Share
Trump Team Killed Rule Designed To Protect Health Workers From Pandemic Like COVID-19
Just in case anyone does not realize how much of the deadly response to COVID-19 is the fault of the Trump administration.....
There are still no specific federal regulations protecting health care workers from deadly airborne pathogens such as influenza, tuberculosis or the coronavirus. This fact hit home during the last respiratory pandemic, the H1N1 outbreak in 2009. Thousands of Americans died and dozens of health care workers got sick. At least four nurses died. Studies conducted after the H1N1 crisis found.... shortages of personal protective equipment.
OSHA experts were confident new airborne infectious disease regulations would make hospitals and nursing homes safer when future pandemics hit. Those rules.... forced the health care industry to adopt safety plans and buy more equipment designed to protect staff and patients.
So concerted efforts were made to change this under President Obama's administration.....
But making a new infectious disease regulation, affecting much of the American health care system, is time-consuming and contentious. It requires lengthy consultation with scientists, doctors and other state and federal regulatory agencies as well as the nursing home and hospital industries that would be forced to implement the standard.
.... OSHA went step by step through that process for six years, and by early 2016 the new infectious disease rule was ready. The Obama White House formally added it to a list of regulations scheduled to be implemented in 2017.
Then came the presidential election.
And then, you guessed it....
When Trump took office in 2017, his team stopped work on new federal regulations that would have forced the health care industry to prepare for an airborne infectious disease pandemic such as COVID-19.
In the spring of 2017, the Trump team formally stripped OSHA's airborne infectious disease rule from the regulatory agenda... the decision appeared to be part of a wider effort to cut regulations and bureaucratic oversight.
"If that rule had gone into effect, then every hospital, every nursing home would essentially have to have a plan where they made sure they had enough respirators and they were prepared for this sort of pandemic," said David Michaels, who was head of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration until January 2017.
And then the deadliest pandemic in any of our lifetimes hit and....
This spring, hospitals and nursing homes found themselves.... unprepared and unequipped. Only this time the scale was larger and deadlier. The federal government reports that at least 43,000 front-line health care workers have gotten sick, many infected, while caring for COVID-19 patients in facilities where personal protective equipment was being rationed.
....the infectious disease standard would have required the health care industry to do far more. It sets out specific standards for planning and training. It would also have forced facilities to stockpile personal protective equipment to handle "surges" of sick patients such as the ones seen with COVID-19.
So now what?
Congress should immediately implement the infectious disease regulations shelved by the Trump administration as an emergency rule before a second wave of the coronavirus hits.
Democrats in the House of Representatives passed a bill in mid-May that would do so, but the Republican-controlled Senate has blocked the measure, and the White House still opposes the rules.
....the current head of OSHA, Loren Sweatt, argued enough rules are already in place to protect workers.