Trump Team Killed Rule Designed To Protect Health Workers From Pandemic Like COVID-19 [View all]
Source: NPR
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.
"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.
"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.
Read more: https://www.npr.org/2020/05/26/862018484/trump-team-killed-rule-designed-to-protect-health-workers-from-pandemic-like-cov
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