Listen: Remarks from MiCCA on rollbacks, public health, and climate action
- MiCCA Admin
- Jun 12
- 5 min read
Read the transcript of MiCCA director's opening remarks at the Michigan Climate Summit on June 12, 2026 in East Lansing. Hear her speak at 40:27 in the video above.
Show of hands: how many people here were vaccinated against smallpox?
Well, I was not. General distribution of the smallpox vaccine stopped in 1982. Because there was no longer a reason for it.
Eradicating a deadly disease that once killed millions - is an example of one humanity’s biggest public health victories. And it’s not alone. There are countless public health campaigns and biomedical, technological advancements that have dramatically increased our lifespans and improved the quality of life.
Since the year 1900, infant mortality has decreased 90%, and maternal mortality has decreased 99%. It’s hard to imagine that for most of human history, half of all children born would die before reaching the age of 15.
I would be remiss to not mention that these accomplishments also came at great costs to the most disenfranchised people through unethical experimentation. Their benefits have also not been equitably distributed. Today, we have the know-how to improve the quality of life for so many more people, in so many more ways. Thousands still die every day in the world of preventable diseases and conditions because they cannot access care and are unjustly exposed to hazards.
A disease that once killed millions of people… gone. We haven’t had any, zero, reported cases since 1977. The idea here is to remind us that we have the capacity to solve large, existential threats. What is now a generally held belief - the expectation that our children will naturally outlive us - would have been unimaginable for so many people who came before us.
Remembering is important for our future. And we need to know our history - so we don’t backslide on our advancements, so we don’t take things for granted, and we need to remember and hold up the ugly sides too, like how Edward Jenner tested out his smallpox vaccine in 1796 on his gardener’s eight-year-old son, James Phipps. Most definitely in a coercive way without informed consent.
That fact doesn’t make for as nice of a story, as my clean smallpox chart would have you believe. But it’s part of the story that we need to remember, so that we don’t just romanticize Jenner and the data, so that we are reminded to do things differently and better.
We’re all here because we recognize that climate change is an existential threat. And I think most of us are on the same page that we have the solutions and mechanisms to reverse the tide to prevent from reaching 1.6 degrees celsius in global warming, if not 1.5.
Right now, our biggest challenge is a social one, not technological, and not even a policy one, though talking heads and political pundits would have you think differently.
If you care about public health, environmental justice, climate action, healthcare access, civil rights, and countless other causes, this has not been a good year.
Polluters valuing profits over people is not new, and powerful entities have always treated some human lives as disposable. As many frontline communities will tell you, they’ve been dismissed when raising concerns about their water and air and so many other disparities.
What is new with the current administration is the thoughtless breakdown of systems. Expertise - both from impacted communities and scientific researchers - has been completely sidelined.
This is clear in the rescission of the Endangerment Finding - which was a scientific conclusion, upheld by the Supreme Court in 2007-2009, that greenhouse gases threaten the public’s welfare and can be regulated as air pollutants under the Clean Air Act.
We know that greenhouse gases are hurting our planet and our health, disrupting the fragile balance of our world, leading to more hurricanes, flooding, wildfires, extreme heat, vector- and water-borne diseases, and also acting as a threat multiplier, among other impacts.
How the EPA is justifying this and dozens of other environmental rollbacks: earlier this year, the administration decided to no longer account for mortality data or public health costs in their regulatory decision-making.
A silver lining - if you can call it that - is that when faced with the blatant disregard for human life, all these rollbacks and cuts can be galvanizing and unifying.
The false mask of partisan loyalty is slipping, as it’s increasingly difficult to justify these decisions as anything but what they are: a greenlight for industries to do whatever they want in the name of profit, without any responsibility or accountability to us. The majority.
My organization’s role, representing clinicians and health professionals, is to put the impacts of climate change, fossil fuel pollution, and these regulatory rollbacks into stark human terms. We so often reduce suffering to numbers - the morbidity data, what the AQI says, the magnitude of a hurricane…
But our goal in engaging with climate change as a health issue, is to put a face to the crisis.
We recently had the honor of touring with Dr. Debra Hendrickson, a pediatrician and author from Reno, Nevada, which is one of the fastest warming cities in the country.
In her book, The Air They Breathe, she recounts wildfire smoke events in terms of an 8-month infant, who was struggling to breathe after weeks of hazardous air quality. She discusses Hurricane Harvey in terms of the five-year old boy named Lucas, who had to flee his house as it was being flooded. And shares so many other accounts of children being directly affected by climate change.
Dr. Hendrickson makes the point that no healthy parent, when their child is in danger, does nothing. And when I asked her how she maintains hope, she believes that love for our children and future generations will save us.
Progress is not a guarantee or a passive, natural thing.
Take a different disease: Measles was declared eliminated in 2000.
Cases are increasing again because of the anti-vax movement, born out of some very legitimate concerns about healthcare, but also a lack of media and health literacy and an industry-backed marketing campaign to sow doubt on our best tools in favor of snake-oil alternatives. (A very similar pattern around climate denial.)
So now that we don’t think of measles as a problem, it’s easy to take the vaccine for granted and quickly regress.
With our changing climate, I hope we don’t let the “new normal” of frequent and extreme weather simply become “normal.” We can and should grieve what we’ve already lost, but we also shouldn’t forget it.
Seeing this vaccine parallel through - what makes vaccines effective in eliminating and preventing diseases is when the majority of people are immunized, we create a protective protective buffer for the most vulnerable people who can’t get vaccinated.
This is herd immunity, but we can also call it collective action.
We have numbers on our side. The majority of people want a healthier, more sustainable future. And the more who are willing to pitch in - even when some can’t or won’t - the closer we are to achieving that vision.
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