Less than a week after a devastating wave of federal funding cuts at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH), which saw more than 130 researchers receive grant-termination notices in a single day, the school gathered Wednesday morning for a convocation ceremony filled with defiant passion and blunt critiques of the Trump administration.
“Our university and field are being tested in ways no one could imagine,” the school’s dean of the faculty, Andrea Baccarelli, said in his opening remarks. Long-held assumptions about the government’s role in public health have now been “turned upside down,” he said, but he reminded graduates of the “values that brought you here in the first place: the belief that every human being deserves good health, that rigorous science improves and saves lives, and that progress is always possible, even in the most difficult times.”
Student speaker Muhammad Jawad Noon echoed that sentiment. “Today, we navigate increasingly treacherous skies,” he said. “The autonomy of universities to pursue truth is under attack. Funding for our critical institutions is being slashed.” A physician, data scientist, and AI engineer from Pakistan, he recalled working in the emergency room as a medical student back home when a terrorist bomb exploded.
“Have you ever watched a mother cradle her dead child?” he asked. “I have.” Amid the chaos and horror, a little girl whose parents had just been killed asked him to help her find her way home. “In that gut-wrenching moment, something in me shattered,” he said. “Medicine could heal her wounds. What about the systems that failed her?…That’s why I’m here.”
That memory comes back to him often, he said, especially amid the upheavals of the Trump administration. “Innocent lives are caught between politics and power,” he said. “I think about that little girl in Pakistan and millions like her around the world, now increasingly vulnerable to entirely new systems of failure. The stars by which we navigate seem dimmer than ever.”
But he urged his classmates to keep going, “Critics will tell us our work is too political, too expensive, too idealistic. But remember: many public health victories were once dismissed as impossible. Smallpox eradication? Impossible. Seatbelt laws? Too restrictive. Clean water acts? Too expensive,” he said. “Yet here we stand, beneficiaries of those once-impossible dreams.”
Keynote speaker Céline Gounder, a professor of medicine at New York University and an editor at KFF Health News, a San Francisco-based news organization, offered a pointed, specific critique of the Trump administration’s threats to public health, including to institutions like the School of Public Health. “Today we see rising threats to the public health institutions that have kept our world safe for generations,” she said, “cuts to research that benefits the lives of millions, looming public health emergencies that are not being addressed with the urgency they demand, and a continued coordinated attack on the very idea of the scientific process.”
She took aim in particular at the growing crisis of mis- and disinformation, which she said has been accelerated by the current administration. “Over the past few months, we have seen the Trump administration engage not only in medical misinformation, but in active censorship of scientific discourse,” Gounder said. “Federal employees have been directed to avoid using words such as ‘bias,’ ‘minority’ and ‘systemic.’ We've seen CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] data purged and NIH [National Institutes of Health] researchers barred from traveling to HIV/AIDS conferences. The current administration is waging a war on science.”
Nowhere is that war clearer, she told graduates, than in the realm of vaccines, which are estimated to have saved more than 150 million lives globally in the last 50 years. A “flood of Orwellian doublespeak from public health agencies,” Gounder said, has contributed to falling vaccination rates, which makes Americans more vulnerable to preventable diseases such as polio, whooping cough, influenza, and, notably, measles.
An expert in HIV and infectious diseases, Gounder practiced medicine in Brazil, screened high-risk patients in southern Africa for tuberculosis, and volunteered as an aid worker in Guinea during the 2015 Ebola outbreak. In 2020-2021, she served on a White House advisory board on COVID policy. In her talk, she criticized the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s recently-announced plans to require clinical trials for updated COVID vaccines (“misguided on multiple fronts”) and decried this week’s threat by U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., famously a vaccine skeptic, to bar NIH researchers from publishing in mainstream medical journals.
“Instead, he wants to create government-run journals, further politicizing science and isolating American researchers from the global scientific community,” Gounder said. “Unfortunately, that playbook is terribly effective.” According to a Gallup poll, one in five Americans now believe vaccines are more dangerous that the diseases they prevent.
Gounder also called out the Trump administration’s attack on public health institutions—the withdrawal from the World Health Organization, the firing of public health workers across the federal government, the dismantling of programs that address numerous public health issues, and the freezing of research funding to Harvard and other universities.
“To the extent that these attacks on public health are being guided by any ideology, they seem to follow the well-known motto of Silicon Valley, ‘Move fast and break things,’” she said, the second commencement speaker in two days to quote Mark Zuckerberg ’06 and his famous line. “But that is an extremely dangerous way to approach public health,” she continued, “because with public health, when you're talking about trust, once you break something, it often can't be fixed.”
Gounder praised Harvard and President Alan M. Garber for standing up to Trump’s attacks and encouraged graduates to speak out as well, in whatever forum they can, including their own communities. “Public health professionals can no longer afford the luxury of invisibility,” she said. “You must explain to people what we do and why it matters, and you must speak loud.”
Gounder also touched on another recurring theme of the day: the threats to international students. Last week, the Trump administration declared it was revoking Harvard’s ability to enroll foreign students (Harvard filed suit to stop the order; an injunction is in place, with a preliminary hearing scheduled for Thursday). HSPH has one of Harvard’s most diverse student bodies: of the 615 students graduating this year, 40 percent come from abroad, representing 52 countries. “America has led the world in scientific progress for generations,” she said, “in large part because we have welcomed the best and the brightest from around the world to learn and work here, my parents among them.”
Later, after all of the graduates had received their diplomas—each one handing a slip of paper to the announcer as they approached the stage, showing how to pronounce their names—Baccarelli, who is Italian, introduced the last element of the ceremony, a video in which 14 students recited, each in their own language, the preamble to the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. “I am immensely proud to be part of such an international community,” Baccarelli said, “particularly at this time.”
