Make Public-Health Officials Stay in Their Lane Again

On Monday, amid a measles outbreak, a bird-flu epidemic, and a disturbing report of poor safety precautions at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced a surprising new area of focus for his agency: fighting anti-Semitism.

“Anti-Semitism—like racism—is a spiritual and moral malady that sickens societies and kills people with lethalities comparable to history’s most deadly plagues,” he wrote on X, linking to a Department of Health and Human Services press release. In it, the Trump administration accuses Columbia University of “ongoing inaction in the face of relentless harassment of Jewish students.” It is more accurate to say that Columbia has reacted to anti-Semitism in ways that some find insufficient and others find excessive, but regardless, HHS, along with the Department of Education and the General Services Administration, is undertaking “a comprehensive review” of Columbia’s $51.4 million in federal contracts and $5 billion in federal grant commitments. In Kennedy’s telling, “censorship and false narratives of woke cancel culture have transformed our great universities into greenhouses for this deadly and virulent pestilence.”

I hate anti-Semitism. Columbia has struggled to protect both the Title VI rights of its Jewish students and the free-speech rights of its Palestine-aligned activists. And federal bureaucrats in the Department of Education who enforce civil-rights laws arguably have an obligation to monitor campuses that get federal funds to ensure that both of those rights are adequately protected.

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Public-health officials, however, needn’t get near debates about campus anti-Semitism. They are charged with stopping literal plagues and pestilence, and perhaps with mitigating chronic illnesses at scale, not with eradicating social ills that they metaphorically liken to a disease.

Watching America’s highest-ranking health official opine on an issue so far beyond his ambit reminds me of an infamous moment from the coronavirus pandemic: when public-health workers signed a letter stating that, despite months of vilifying in-person gatherings, they were now encouraging mass assemblies to protest the killing of George Floyd. “As public health advocates,” their open letter stated, “we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission. We support them as vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of Black people.” Like many Americans, I objected: I hate police abuses too, but public-health workers, who have no expertise in policing or activism, should’ve stayed in their lane. Anytime public-health officials veer into matters beyond their core expertise, they risk undermining their most sound, scientifically grounded pronouncements.

Officials on the left and right have spent years stretching the meaning of public-health emergency to include things as varied as vaping, racism, and campus sexual assault. In recent months, officials have invoked the concept to include immigration at the U.S. border and a lack of affordable housing in Little Rock, Arkansas. These issues might be tangentially related to health or, as in the case of vaping, might have an effect on public health over time and warrant some intervention—studies of lung health, say, or addiction-prevention programs. But they don’t qualify as acute public-health emergencies. In a 2021 essay arguing for a more scrupulous—and sensible—approach, Lindsay F. Wiley, who leads the health law and policy program at UCLA’s law school, argued that the designation public-health emergency should be reserved for “a demonstrated threat of a serious communicable disease with epidemic potential—one that is believed to be caused by a novel or previously controlled infectious agent that is readily transmissible.”

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Health officials should apply a similar restraint to their nonemergency work. It’s true that some acts of bigotry can cause stress in victims, and that chronic stress can have cumulative health consequences. But HHS sensibly refrains from policing the many other stressors that college students might experience—final exams, romantic breakups—and it shouldn’t make exceptions for stressors that are morally repugnant. Kennedy is right that “anti-Semitism—like racism—is a spiritual and moral malady.” But its awfulness does not imply that HHS should fight it any more than cancer’s awfulness implies that civil-rights bureaucrats at the Department of Education should spend part of their workday shrinking tumors. Institutions are optimized for their own mission. The widespread demand, circa 2020, that schools, businesses, and more reorient themselves as centers of anti-racist activism produced only ineffectual statements and dysfunction. Enlisting the nation’s health department to fight anti-Semitism is a similarly flawed proposition.

If HHS in particular gets even a little worse at pandemic preparedness due to its work on campus life, people could die. Meanwhile, the health secretary should be advocating for grants and contracts that help fight disease; pulling such funding for reasons unrelated to their efficacy would be a setback for Americans’ health. Researchers at Columbia have made formidable discoveries on health matters as diverse as stomach cancer, tumor-targeting vaccines, and how to treat hereditary breast cancer, and they run clinical research trials on most diseases you could name.

Members of Congress, Department of Education bureaucrats, Jewish civil-society organizations, plaintiffs lawyers, and more are all pressuring Columbia in various ways to address campus anti-Semitism. America in general benefits from institutions and people who fight anti-Semitism. But this does not require the participation of leaders who should be busy fighting disease and death.