To the Honorable Governor Phil Scott:

We are Vermonters who are concerned about the state of health in our country. We are extremely worried about the actions taken by the Trump administration that are destroying our national public health infrastructure. We urge you to use your position as the top elected official in Vermont to aggressively oppose the present federal political attacks in order to limit the damage and to protect the health and welfare of Vermonters.

Donald Trump has forcefully and intentionally eroded our democracy and, in doing so, he has intentionally disabled our public health ecosystem. He has fired tens of thousands of federal employees, restructured or eliminated federal agencies that oversee critical public health related services, and appointed sycophants who are ill-prepared to lead in their assigned duties and who adhere to a culture that is anti-science. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a particularly damaging figure as the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, and his racist, anti-science, anti-vaccine rhetorical and policy approach will harm the health of all of us. He must be removed from office immediately.

These federal actions will have real and debilitating effects on the health and well being of Vermonters. Examples include:

· Severe cuts to Medicaid as a result of H.R.1 which will cause about 30,000 Vermonters to lose their medical insurance coverage.
· Layoffs of the federal and state public health governmental workforce, impacting our State’s ability to keep our communities safe, including disaster response (floods), disease outbreak investigation and mitigation, ensuring food access, protecting workers, families, and our most vulnerable neighbors.
· Decreased or eliminated funding for nonprofit organizations that are integral to Vermont’s social safety net like community food shelves, support for elderly residents, after school, and other programs.
· Undermining systems and programs that center Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) and anti-racism efforts as the basic tenets of achieving health equity.
· Endangering lives by reducing support for services and care and for vulnerable populations such as those living with chronic or infectious disease, families, pregnant people, young children, the LGBTQ+ community, and others.
· Increasing avoidable premature death and disability by destroying the vaccine infrastructure systems that support research, development, distribution, and accessibility for individuals and families.
· Decreased funds and leadership support for emergency preparedness and response.
Eliminating research funding and associated policy and programming to curb climate change and advance renewable and sustainable sources of energy.
· Stifling UVM biomedical research innovation in areas such as cancer care, infectious disease science, and research on chronic diseases.
· Endangering the health of our migrant workers and immigrants through illegal detentions and instilling fear; these detentions negatively affect Vermont businesses in their ability to contribute to local and state economic stability.

We urge you to take a stand in protecting the health of all Vermonters, through science-based efforts that will actually result in a healthier state. Please see an example of the types of policies that would improve the health of all Americans, in particular the Improving the Health of All Americans Together report, prepared by Defend Public Health in August.

You must take every action necessary to offset the assaults being inflicted on Vermont’s public health, governmental and community support systems. We call on you to do the following:

· Use your position to speak out and act publicly to protect all Vermonters.
· Respond to the administration’s attacks on Public Health and other safety net programs with the type of coordinated efforts within the state government that worked so well during the pandemic. The health of Vermonters is under attack. This is an emergency. We need action now.
· Empower the newly appointed Commissioner of Health in working with public health, academic, and community based professionals to guide your responses to Federal decisions impacting our State.
· Provide strong support for Vermont’s ongoing collaboration with other Northeast states to decouple immunization and other health policy, vaccine procurement, and health insurance regulation from HHS, and in developing alternative guidelines and recommendations as necessary to meet the needs of Vermonters.
· Continue to ensure all Vermonters maintain easy access to COVID (and other) immunizations in accordance with recommendations of established medical organizations (American Academy of Pediatrics; American Medical Association; Infectious Disease Society of America, etc.).
· Strongly support the continuation and improvement of Health Department efforts to work toward true health equity.

The public health and health care community are energized to advise and assist you in these critical efforts to speak out against the dangerous effects of the anti-science, anti-public health actions of the Trump administration. The Vermont Department of Health is one of the best in the country, they are ready and willing to advise and assist you in these critical efforts.

We all can join forces to combat these real threats to our democratic system which endanger the health and welfare of all Vermonters.

Sincerely, those undersigned: