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July 17, 2025 
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During the Covid-19 pandemic, the infectious disease doctor Monica Gandhi gained something of a reputation as a so-called Covid contrarian for her willingness to disagree with her fellow public health experts. She argued against closing outdoor parks and beaches, called for reopening schools and even disobeyed a lockdown order that would have shut down the H.I.V. clinic where she served as medical director.
But as critical as she was toward officials during the pandemic, Gandhi is deeply disturbed by the Trump administration’s broad assault on our health and science institutions today.
“The pandemic laid bare the fact that we needed to reform our health institutions, but what is happening now is not a reckoning but destruction,” she writes in a guest essay.
It’s true, Gandhi writes, that many of her fellow left-leaning public health experts supported decisions that weren’t grounded in science. But that doesn’t make it any better for the Trump administration to politicize science and make decisions based on ideology. Mass grant cancellations, a retreat from global health and Medicaid cuts all serve to harm Americans, she writes.
Read the guest essay:
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