Patty Murray

WASHINGTON – Sen. Patty Murray on Wednesday launched an initiative aimed at rebuilding trust in the nation’s public health system, assembling a group of experts to develop a “blueprint” for policy after the tenure of President Donald Trump and his top health official, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The Washington Democrat, a member of the Senate Health Committee who led the panel during the coronavirus pandemic, announced in a news release what she calls the Public Health for America Working Group. She will formally launch the initiative with an event at Washington State University in Pullman on Wednesday, where a panel of public health officials and WSU faculty members will discuss the working group’s goals.

“Right now, Trump and RFK Jr. have put our public health system on life support,” Murray said in a statement, accusing the administration of downplaying an ongoing rise in measles cases and responding too slowly to an outbreak of cyclosporiasis, a food-borne illness that sickened thousands of Americans this year.

“We can’t just put back what was there before,” Murray added. “Public health policy can’t become a political football – it can’t shift drastically every four years based on political ideology; it has to be reliably grounded in science and facts.”

Kennedy, a political scion and former environmental lawyer who initially ran for president as a Democrat in 2024 before endorsing Trump, arrived at the Department of Health and Human Services as a voice for the many Americans who distrust the scientific establishment. Long a critic of certain vaccines, the HHS secretary dissolved the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices in June 2025, accusing its 17 members of acting as a “rubber stamp” for the pharmaceutical industry and describing the move as “necessary to re-establish public confidence in vaccine science.”

One of the former members of that committee, University of Washington Professor Helen Chu, is part of Murray’s working group. In a statement, Chu said she is honored to be part of the initiative, which is intended to inform future legislation through listening sessions, roundtable discussions and outreach efforts.

“As a physician and a scientist who has spent my career ensuring people have access to safe and effective vaccines, it has been a challenging few years to watch the public health systems that keep Americans safe be dismantled,” Chu said. “I am very much looking forward to contributing expertise on vaccines, pandemic preparedness, and academic research to this committee, and helping to rebuild our public health systems for a better future.”

The working group’s other members are Joshua Sharfstein, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and former head of the Maryland Department of Health who also served in the Obama administration; Patty Hayes, a registered nurse and chair of the Washington State Board of Health; Jeffrey Levi, who worked on AIDS prevention in the Clinton administration and later taught health policy at George Washington University; and Vin Gupta, a physician affiliated with the University of Washington and medical analyst for MS NOW, a TV channel aligned with the Democratic Party.

In an interview with the New York Times announcing her initiative, Murray said the nation’s public health institutions have been “ripped apart,” and her goal is to “rebuild them in a way that is lasting and trustworthy,” not just to put the pieces back together the way they were before Trump and Kennedy came into office in 2025.

That could be a challenge at a time when Americans’ opinions about health policy are split along political lines and memories of pandemic-era battles over masks, vaccines and other public health measures are still fresh. Murray cites a poll conducted in March and April by the Harvard School of Public Health and the de Beaumont Foundation, which found the number of Americans who say they trust recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention fell from 77% to 50% in the first year Kennedy oversaw the CDC, part of the Department of Health and Human Services.

As the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, Murray holds one of the most powerful roles in Congress. If her party manages to take control of the Senate in this fall’s midterm elections, she could soon lead the panel, which wields considerable influence by controlling federal spending. She also remains a senior member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, which she previously led.

The working group’s findings “will inform nonpartisan policy proposals” as the senator “works to build consensus around legislation to rebuild public health in America,” Murray spokesman Amir Avin said. Murray’s working group promises to organize its work around a set of principles that include a focus on prevention, preparing for future threats and building trust in science and medicine through transparency and clear communication.

The kickoff event will begin at 12 p.m. on Wednesday and will be open to media and WSU students, staff and faculty, according to Avin. The senator will deliver a brief address, followed by a panel discussion about her initiative with WSU faculty and state and local public health officials. The group’s mission is not merely to restore what existed before 2025, Amin reiterated, “but to design a public health system that is stronger, more resilient, and structurally protected from political interference – no matter who holds the White House or controls Congress.”