Trump Team Killed Obama Rule Designed To Protect Health Workers From Pandemic Like COVID-19
BY BRIAN MANN
When President Trump took office in 2017, his team stopped work on new federal regulations that would have forced the healthcare industry to prepare for an airborne infectious disease pandemic like COVID-19. That decision is documented in federal records reviewed by NPR.
Health care workers hold a placard that says From Heroes to Zeroes during a protest against hospital under-staffing and insufficient personal protective equipment for doctors and nurses treating COVID-19 patients amid the coronavirus pandemic. The protest took place outside Saint Joseph Medical Center hospital in Burbank, Calif. on May 19. CREDIT: Barcroft Media/Barcroft Media via Getty Images
“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 at the time served as head of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
There are still no specific federal regulations protecting healthcare workers from deadly airborne pathogens like 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 healthcare workers got sick. At least four nurses died.
Studies conducted after H1N1 found voluntary federal safety guidelines designed to limit the spread of airborne pathogens in medical facilities often weren’t being followed. There were also shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE).
“H1N1 made it very clear OSHA did not have adequate standards for airborne transmission and contact transmission and so we began writing a standard to do that,” Michaels said.
HIV-AIDS rule set the standard for protecting workers
OSHA experts were confident new airborne infectious disease regulations would make hospitals and nursing homes safer when future pandemics hit. That’s because similar rules had already been created for blood-borne pathogens like Ebola and Hepatitis.
Those rules, implemented during the HIV-AIDS epidemic, forced the healthcare industry to implement safety plans and buy more equipment designed to protect staff and patients.
But making a new infectious disease regulation, affecting much of the American healthcare system, is time-consuming and contentious. It requires lengthy consultation with scientists, doctors, other state and federal regulatory agencies, as well as the nursing and hospital industries that would be forced to implement the standard.
Federal records reviewed by NPR show 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.
An emphasis on deregulation
In the spring of 2017, two years before COVID-19 hit, the Trump team formally stripped OSHA’s airborne infectious disease rule from the regulatory agenda. NPR could find no indication the new administration had specific policy concerns about the infectious disease rules.
Instead, the decision appeared to be part of a wider effort to cut regulations and bureaucratic oversight.
“Earlier this year we set a target of adding zero new regulatory costs onto the American economy,” President Trump said in December 2017. “As a result, the never-ending growth of red tape in America has come to a sudden, screeching and beautiful halt.”
The impact on the federal effort to protect healthcare workers from diseases like COVID-19 was immediate.
“The infectious disease standard was put on the back burner. Work stopped,” said Michaels, now a professor at George Washington University.
A medical worker is assisted into PPE while standing inside an area marked in blue tape, a “warm” area, before stepping into a patient’s room in the COVID-19 Intensive Care Unit at Harborview Medical Center Friday, May 8, 2020, in Seattle. CREDIT: Elaine Thompson/AP
A deadly escalation of the H1N1 crisis
This spring, hospitals and nursing homes found themselves facing much of the same crisis they experienced during H1N1, with many facilities unprepared and unequipped. Only this time the scale was larger and deadlier.
The federal government reports that at least 43,000 frontline healthcare workers have gotten sick, many of them infected while caring for COVID-19 patients in facilities where personal protective equipment was being rationed.
“Even just a few months ago, I couldn’t have imagined that I would have been on a Zoom call reading out the names of registered nurses who have died on the front lines of a pandemic,” said Bonnie Castillo who heads a union called National Nurses United.
“The memorial was not only about grief. It was also about anger.”
OSHA’s infectious disease rule debated in Washington
Castillo says the infectious disease regulations shelved by the Trump administration should be implemented immediately by Congress as an emergency rule before a second wave of the coronavirus hits.
“Which obviously would mandate that employers have the highest level of PPE, not the lowest,” she said.
Democrats in the House passed a bill in mid-May that would do that, but the measure has been blocked by the Republican-controlled Senate and the rules are still opposed by the White House.
The Trump administration hasn’t responded to NPR’s repeated inquiries about the infectious disease rule. But in a briefing call with lawmakers earlier this month, the current head of OSHA Loren Sweatt argued there are already enough rules in place to protect workers.
“We have mandatory standards related to personal protective equipment and blood-borne pathogens and sanitation standards,” Sweatt said, in a recording provided to NPR. “We have existing standards that can address this area.”
The hospital industry also opposes the new safety rules. Nancy Foster with the American Hospital Association said voluntary guidelines for airborne pandemics are adequate.
“You’re right they’re not regulations but they are the guidance that we want to follow,” Foster said. “They set forth the expectation for infection control, so in a sense they’re just like regulations.”
But the infectious disease standard would have required the healthcare 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 like the ones we’ve seen with COVID-19.
NPR also found the lack of fixed regulations allowed the Trump administration to relax worker safety guidelines. Federal agencies did so repeatedly this spring as COVID-19 spread and shortages of PPE worsened.
As a consequence, hospitals could say they were meeting federal guidelines while requiring doctors and nurses to re-use masks and protective gowns after exposure to sick patients.
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