Trump’s Environmental Policies Killed Thousands of People, Scientists Say
The British medical journal The Lancet released a new report attributing 22,000 deaths in 2019 to the former president’s regulatory rollbacks.
The Trump administration deliberately harnessed racism and class animosity to push policies that caused hundreds of thousands of U.S. deaths, according to a scathing new report in the British medical journal The Lancet.
After undertaking a comprehensive assessment of the health and environment impacts of Donald Trump’s presidency, the 33 scientists who co-authored the article estimated that rollbacks of environmental and workplace protections led to 22,000 excess deaths in 2019 alone. They also found that 40% of U.S. deaths during 2020 from Covid-19 would have been avoided if the country’s death rate had been closer to that of its G7 peers, and blamed Trump for eschewing the advice of public health agencies and politicizing common sense responses to the pandemic such as mask-wearing.