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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. Happy Earth Day and good morning, everyone. One of the things we're doing on the show during Trump's first 100 days is a Health and Climate Tuesday section of the show. Since this particular Tuesday is Earth Day, we'll begin with a story right at the intersection of climate and health. Did you see this in the New York Times last week? Headline, How Is Climate Change Harming Health? Studying That Just Got Harder. Here's an example of how back in January, when Los Angeles was ravaged by wildfires, some of the firefighters who responded to the blaze "had elevated levels of lead and mercury inside cells in their blood."

We know this thanks to early findings from the LA Fire Health Study, a 10-year effort by researchers looking to understand the health effects of exposure to smoke and other pollution from the recent California wildfires. That's in the article. The LA Fire Health Study and other research efforts focused on the effects of climate disasters on human health are set to lose funding from the National Institute of Health, the NIH. That according to an NIH, National Institutes of Health, document obtained by the New York Times. Joining me now is the author of that story, Maggie Astor, New York Times reporter covering the intersection between health and politics. Maggie, thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC.

Maggie Astor: Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: What's this NIH document? Tell us more.

Maggie Astor: This NIH document is essentially a script that was given to NIH employees who work with grant applicants, which is to say, academics from various institutions that are applying for NIH grants. The script tells the NIH employees to inform any applicants whose application includes anything related to climate change, even if it's not the primary focus of their grant application, if their application includes anything related to climate change whatsoever. It instructs the NIH employee to tell them that climate change is no longer a priority of the NIH to study and that if they would like to resubmit their application, they need to remove everything related to climate change from it.

Brian Lehrer: Wow. There are gradations of that, right? The wording "not to prioritize", which is in your article, research related to climate change, not to prioritize. That's not as strong as some of the other directives in the document you cite, an intent not to fund research on gender identity, vaccine hesitancy, or diversity, equity, and inclusion, and telling researchers submitting grant applications to remove all references to those topics. Is there a distinction between not to fund, remove all references, versus not to prioritize research related to climate change?

Maggie Astor: No, there's no distinction. That's just slightly different wording in different sentences of the article. This is all part of the same document, and the same language applies to all four of those topics. The document says-- The words the document uses are, is the policy of the NIH not to prioritize? The rest of the script in instructing people to remove any mention of these topics from their application in order to be considered, makes clear that the application is not going to be considered with any mention of any of those topics. They're all four of them on the same plane. There's no distinction.

Brian Lehrer: Your article is filled with examples of medical research studies that will be cut or could be cut. I want to say a few of these out loud because I didn't know about them. Most of our listeners will not have heard of these things. There's one at the University of Southern California studying the effects of extreme heat on children's cardiovascular health. There's the Cincinnati Center on Climate Change and Health, which you report has been studying the effects of extreme heat on the immune system.

Let me ask you about another one. University of Nevada study that found heat waves increase the likelihood of premature births. Nobody's against preventing premature births. Can you tell us a little about the epidemiology professor there, Lyndsey Darrow, in Reno, and some more of the specifics that are in your article on that?

Maggie Astor: Yes, absolutely. This is a study that was published last year. It was part of a larger NIH-funded project that Dr. Darrow is still working on. There's going to be some more research and more details coming out of that project that aren't included in the article because they haven't been peer reviewed and published yet. The portion of the study that has been published found that heat waves increase the likelihood of premature births, especially among particular demographics, including women under 30 and people of color.

It increased the likelihood of premature births by a small amount across the board, regardless of demographics. Within these particularly vulnerable demographics, the increase in premature births was higher. What she and her co-researchers found was that this increase in premature births happened very quickly. It happened in the literal days after a heat wave. We're not talking about a heat wave, potentially a few weeks or months later in pregnancy, leading to premature birth. In the four, five, six days after a heat wave, premature births increased in an immediate way.

Brian Lehrer: I could go down the list of more examples that you give in the article, but those examples from Reno, Nevada, Cincinnati, Ohio, those are states that voted for Trump. Ohio had JD Vance as senator. These are not just Ivy League or blue state institutions studying the effects of climate change on health in their areas. Do you report on if the administration thinks this is going to be popular when these local colleges and universities work is getting cut so much?

Maggie Astor: Honestly, I don't know whether the administration thinks it's going to be popular. I reached out to the administration for comment, of course, and they said that they were prioritizing research that they believed directly affected the health of Americans. Now, certainly, I think the evidence is clear that climate change does fall into that category of directly increasing the health of Americans. That is the justification that they gave. Beyond that, I really can't speak to how they think it's going to play out in the court of public opinion.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we're going to open our phones here on two tracks during this segment. One directly to what Maggie asked her from the New York Times reporting on. Do we have any climate and health researchers listening? What are you studying? Are you funded by the NIH? What do you think will happen to your work or that of others in the field who you know under this review? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. We would love to hear from some climate and health researchers. I realize that's a limited population, but if we happen to have any out there, the phones are open for you.

At the same time, more broadly, for anyone, not just climate and health scientists, this is the 55th anniversary of Earth Day. April 22, 1970, was the first one. What's been the environmental cause you've been most passionate about, and has that changed over the years? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, call or text. What's been the environmental cause you've been most passionate about, and has that changed over the years for you? 212-433-9692.

For myself, I'll tell you a little story here. I got into environmental issues as a young adult, and at first it was about preserving natural areas, keeping the Adirondacks forever wild, as they call it when I used to go camping there all the time. Although some of the people who I met from there would say they didn't want forever wild limitations. They could develop their hotels and amusement parks, and whatever without destroying the woods because it wasn't in their interest to destroy the woods. The woods were what drew people there in the first place. They'd never kill them off.

No matter which side of the issues anyone was on, that issue first sparked my interest in the environment. I would think about things like that on Earth Day. Eventually, as I learned more and took a more broad view, I realized there was and must be more to it than that. Earth Day was maybe even misnamed because it couldn't just be about the Earth, the planet, or nature in some abstract way. It was also really about human health. The same as our topic today with Maggie, the health of other species, too, but very much including human health.

I was interested enough that I went back to school and got a master's degree in environmental health. Instead of hiking and identifying different kinds of trees and birds, or in addition to those things, I was taking courses in toxicology and epidemiology. Earth Day is about all of that for me now. It's about wilderness, and it's about the effects of the Cross Bronx Expressway and things like that. That's some of my own Earth Day journey. What's been yours or anything specifically on climate and health? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, call or text.

Maggie, to the point of what I was just saying, sometimes even fighting for the climate can sound abstract, like it's air for the sake of air. I'm glad there are articles like yours that tie it so directly to the studies on the human health effects of climate change. Any thoughts on your beat in that respect?

Maggie Astor: Yes, I think it's really important to take what can seem like esoteric government policies or government policies that are distant from your life and drill down to the effects, the trickle down effects that those policies have as they affect federal research, as they go down to the state level, as they go down to the local level. My beat includes a lot of work on the health effects of climate change. It also includes work on the concrete effects of other government policies on our health. My goal is always to drill down to that level at which these policies affect real people and how these policies affect real people. They're not just words on a piece of paper. They actually affect the way we live our lives, what we have access to, what information we have to help us protect our health.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call from an actual environmental researcher calling in from Pennsylvania. Eric, you're on WNYC. Hi, Eric, thank you very much for calling in.

Eric: Yes, hi Brian, thank you for taking my call. First time caller. Yes, I am or was. I'm really not sure right now if I am or still will be a federal researcher. I work for the Department of Interior. One of the things that we've been looking at recently is the effect of saltwater intrusion or advancement up the Delaware River towards Philadelphia. We were out all fall collecting samples during the drought, and now we were interpreting that data. Now we've had all these cuts, and I'm not sure what's going to happen to all that.

Obviously, as sea level rises due to the effects of climate change, specifically that's going to affect a place like Philadelphia, where there are freshwater intakes on the Delaware River and as salt water comes up and threaten that city's water supply. That's what we were looking at.

Brian Lehrer: When you're talking water supply, you're definitely talking human health. It's too obvious-

Eric: Human health, exactly.

Brian Lehrer: -practically to even say. Can you say anything about the status of your government funding? Has it been rescinded for sure, discontinued, or is it under review? What can you tell us?

Eric: This particular funding was national, and I'm really not sure. We're not going to really know until September of the funding, and I'm not really sure whether I will still be working there. Everything is-- The only thing that's certain is uncertainty. I would hate to see all the work that we did, all the samples that we collected and the taxpayer paid for, to have analyzed, to have that just go into limbo. Yes, I wish I had-

Brian Lehrer: You don't know.

Eric: -something more to say, except that I really don't know.

Brian Lehrer: The only thing that's certain right now is uncertainty. That's a good way to put it. Eric, thank you for telling your story. Maggie, he brings up whether there's a lot of money that's been wasted if they discontinue a lot of things without coming to the conclusion of the studies and their public health implications for policy that could be implemented. Another listener writes in a text if the-- No, not that one. Sorry. We're getting a lot. This one already disappeared from my screen. Basically, it was about the wind project off the coast of Long Island.

Oh, here it is. "I thought Trump was all about saving money. The Empire Wind Project off the Long Island coast has been approved. It has already started. Isn't it wasteful not to finish what has begun?" Do you know if anybody has asked about a DOGE, Department of Government Efficiency, in economic terms in that respect?

Maggie Astor: I can't speak directly to what economic or financial considerations might be happening in the government's decisions in this area because it wasn't specifically the focus of my article. I can certainly say that, yes, there are a lot of studies that are potentially caught up in this cutoff of funding that are in the middle of the research process. A lot of these grants from the NIH are five-year-long grants, and they allow time to collect the samples, collect the data, go out into the field, do the direct research with the people who are affected by these extreme weather events, and then they also include some time to analyze the data.

Oftentimes, a significant portion of the money from these grants is going to pay the data analysts who are taking the raw data and drawing conclusions from it. It goes to pay the lab technicians who are processing the samples once they've been collected. It goes to compensate people for all of the expertise that it takes, the time and expertise that it takes to turn raw data or raw environmental samples into a study that actually draws reliable conclusions.

One thing that's uncertain right now, we were just talking about uncertainty, is the status of these active grants. We know very clearly from the document that I obtained that the NIH is not going to be funding these types of studies going forward in terms of new applications. It's still unclear whether funding is going to be cut off for grants that are in the middle of their run. The researchers that I spoke to had not heard anything. In some cases, they had directly reached out to their personal contacts at the NIH to ask about the status of their ongoing grants. They had been unable to get the information. Sometimes even their contacts didn't know.

There is a lot of uncertainty around whether research has happened in the past couple years, that was supposed to be analyzed and finished in the next couple years, whether that will be allowed to finish or whether that will be cut off in the middle, which would certainly waste the benefits of the work that was done over the first two years of the project.

Brian Lehrer: In fact, further to that point, a listener just texted, listening to your answer there, "Data is not just going into limbo, they are erasing environmental data." Does your reporting confirm that, or would that be too strong a way to put it?

Maggie Astor: My reporting doesn't confirm or deny that. It's just not something that I have any documentation on. I can't say it is happening. I can't say it's not happening.

Brian Lehrer: My guest, if you're just joining us, is Maggie Astor, who covers the intersection of climate and health for the New York Times. Her article How Is Climate Change Harming Health? Studying That Just Got Harder, about all the things that the Trump administration is ceasing, even sometimes in mid-study, as she was just describing. We're taking calls from any of you who are environmental scientists yourselves to talk about how your research is being affected, and on a separate track, just because this is Earth Day, your own Earth Day journeys, or what kinds of issues you focus on most in the environmental realm and on Earth Day this year. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Let's take one on that latter track from Rocio in Manhattan. Rocio, you're on WNYC. Hi there.

Rocio: Thank you so much for taking my call on Earth Day. I am an indigenous activist that has participated for over 30 years at the United Nations meetings on environment. What I can tell you is that I have not seen much progress on the health of planet Earth as such, and that too much importance is given to the scientific and technological community, and in turn, they have caused many of the issues that drove humanity into this situation. I think that all these studies and international meetings have not produced much of a solution, as it is obvious to all of us. Rather, it has been a waste of time and resources, and that for humanity to live on Earth doesn't require a science degree. All it requires is for us to be human and to be in touch with nature.

Brian Lehrer: Rocio, it sounds like you're really frustrated after years of negotiations with whoever it is from the UN on the environment around where various indigenous groups of people live. What would be a next step?

Rocio: I think that overall, we need a fresh start, and at this point, all we have is Trump. I do not see someone that can offer a different solution that would impact the planet. If his solution fails, then we all fail. We do not have time to play any more politics or environmental games. This is the future of humanity that we are playing with.

Brian Lehrer: Rocio, thank you very much for calling us on Earth Day. We really appreciate it. We're going to go next to Catherine in Westchester, who says her husband is a professor of environmental medicine and apparently is having some grants canceled. Catherine, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in.

Catherine: Hi, Brian, thanks for taking my call and for this topic. Yes, he's-- I think one in particular that really is heartbreaking are the early investigator grants. These are people who have gotten their PhDs and done postdoctoral fellowships and really worked hard. These grants are meant to launch their independent careers. They're very prestigious and highly sought after. They've been rescinded. These people are now extremely disillusioned, looking at leaving the field. In the long term, I think, and talking about waste, as you were before, that's a waste of time and talent and resource also very heartbreaking.

Brian Lehrer: Can you give me an example of a study that you're familiar with through your husband's work that's been canceled?

Catherine: No, I can't. I know they're called the R1 grants. They're early investigator launching independent career grants. I don't know the specific topic.

Brian Lehrer: In environmental medicine.

Catherine: Yes.

Brian Lehrer: Catherine, thank you very much for your call. Maggie, from The Times. A central irony or contradiction here, as you point out, is that RFK Jr says his priority for the agency, his agency, is to study the causes of chronic disease. These are all studies that we've been talking about of the causes of chronic disease, the effects of extreme heat on the immune system, on premature births, on children's cardiovascular health. Do you know if anyone's asked RFK yet about that apparent contradiction?

Maggie Astor: I haven't seen a direct answer from him on that. I think there's a lot of climate denial within the administration, in general, denial that climate change is happening, and denial of these effects. I certainly tried to get answers from RFK and the Department of Health and Human Services in writing my article, and I was unfortunately not able to get a response beyond a fairly bland statement from the spokesperson's office saying that they were prioritizing other things.

It's certainly true that this research has everything to do with chronic disease. One of the researchers that I spoke to, Shohreh Farzan from the University of Southern California, she's the one who's working on the study about children's cardiovascular health and how it's affected or might be affected by wildfires. One of the things she emphasized to me is that one of the best ways to prevent chronic disease is to catch it early. By that, she didn't just mean catch the very first symptoms of it in order to treat it early. She also meant catching exposures and factors very early in life that could lead to chronic disease later.

If those factors were more fully understood, it's possible that interventions could be developed to actually prevent the chronic disease from developing to prevent the exposures, or to respond after the exposures to mitigate the effects of them. Chronic disease prevention is very, very closely tied to the research that is being defunded here.

Brian Lehrer: Is it that climate change is now such a politically incorrect thing to study or acknowledge the existence of in those circles, while Trump says he's going to expand coal mining and other fossil fuel drilling, that the imperative to lock out information about the effects of climate change rises above Kennedy's interest in the causes of chronic disease? Do they compete in that way?

Maggie Astor: There's certainly tension between them. If we want to study the causes of chronic disease, it's become quite clear that one of the many, many, many causes of chronic disease is or could potentially be extreme weather events. I would also just note that while Kennedy runs the Department of Health and Human Services, he works underneath and serves at the pleasure of President Trump. President Trump's agenda is ultimately driving the day here when it comes to climate change.

President Trump has repeatedly called climate change a hoax. He campaigned on essentially eliminating efforts to combat climate change from the federal government and move in the opposite direction. There is most definitely tension between ignoring climate change and combating chronic disease. It is ultimately the Trump administration and not the Kennedy administration when it comes to those decisions.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. A few more texts on people's environmental journeys. One listener writes, "Originally, I was concerned about water and air pollution. Thankfully, the air and water quality have improved due to government regulations. My concern now is climate change." Another listener writes, "I've come to understand much better the intersection between economic status and environmental harm. Communities with fewer means are hurt worse by environmental factors." Another environmental journey or focus story coming from Sira in Queens. Sira, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in.

Sira: Oh, wow, I made it. How's it going, Brian? Happy Earth Day to everyone.

Brian Lehrer: And to you.

Sira: Oh, my gosh. Thank you so much. Yes, I have a nonprofit, and we focus on providing relief to communities going through a water crisis. When we first started, we were just looking to help, and so we were using bottled water. We thought that that was the way. Over time, and I would say less than a year later, we started thinking about more sustainable solutions because we understood the environmental impact that we would be making. I think that more organizations, when looking to tackle these issues, we need to be thinking about more sustainable solutions, especially if you're giving it in large capacity.

We have to be thoughtful about that. That has been our way going forward. We work on long-term solutions when we're providing relief to communities, water filtration systems, and that sort of thing, in addition to box water for emergency purposes. Yes, that's my two cents. I think that that's what we need to be headed towards when serving other communities.

Brian Lehrer: Sira, thank you very much. One more. Nathan in Westport, you're on WNYC. Hi, Nathan.

Nathan: Hi, Brian. Long time, second time. Shout out to Westport. I know some of the people listen, and they tell me when they hear me. Yes, I work for the Conservation Department. Most of what I do is enforcement for wetland protection. That's an aside. I also, I'm on the board of the Mid-Atlantic Invasive Plant Council. It's about invasive plant research. Not as much the health stuff. We're looking at a conference this fall, and last night we were having our meeting, I said, "Hey, we have some money. We should set some grants to help make up for the sudden loss of federal funding."

It's nothing in comparison to what the federal government can do, but it'll be invasive plant research at least, and just help the people who are doing research to help protect the ecosystems. Probably a lot of small organizations that if you can put together 5K and write to schools or research institutes, and help make up at least a little bit of that funding.

Brian Lehrer: That's my question is how much of what is such a big potential pool of money, the federal government and all these grants that they've been giving out to study climate and health and other kinds of health, what can you do at the level of one city or town like West Point and a few nonprofits, how much of it can you make up?

Nathan: Unfortunately, not as much. By the way, as Westport in Connecticut, we'll put together like 10K. It's nothing in comparison. Ecologists are used to working with not much.

Brian Lehrer: Nathan, thank you very much for your call. A little depressing, though it is. Right, Maggie? To finish up, how much does this deprioritizing of climate change-related health research connect with pulling back medical research funding in general? Because climate change or no, I think that's a big area of cuts in the new administration. I've really been puzzled about this. Like, what's the rationale for cutting medical and basic science research as a category?

It's not gender or race or Immigration as some of these other crackdowns are explicitly tied to. I know some of the health studies and science studies are tied to looking at the different effects on diverse populations. Maybe they don't like that, but basic science and health research are more mom and apple pie, I thought. Why are they being made such targets?

Maggie Astor: I think a lot of this is getting caught up in the slash-and-burn approach of DOGE. I mean, the cuts that are being made to these departments which are affecting medical research in a variety of areas, and so much more. They're being made in these sweeping ways. We've already seen in some cases entire departments being cut and then the administration trying to slightly reverse course and hire some people back after they realize that, "Wait, we actually did need those people."

I think to a large extent, it's just this very sweeping, non-targeted approach that is sweeping an enormous amount of very important research up with it. The specific categories that have been targeted in many cases are those ones you mentioned, the research on climate change, research on gender affirming care, research on vaccines. In terms of the broader cuts, they are often happening in this very sweeping way that is just gathering everything up with it.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, thank you for your environmental journey Earth Day calls, and those of you connected directly to environmental health research, climate health research in particular, thank you for your calls and helping us report this story. We thank Maggie Astor, New York Times reporter covering the intersection between health and politics. Her article, How Is Climate Change Harming Health? Studying That Just Got Harder. Maggie, thank you for joining us.

Maggie Astor: Thank you for having me.

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