Brian Lera on WNYC, it's not just elite private colleges like Columbia and Harvard that the Trump administration is trying to defund, though that's what's mostly been in the news.

It's also public colleges and universities that educate mostly working class students.

We'll focus now on the example of CUNY, the City University of New York, specifically in the area

of public health.

This is our Health and Climate Tuesdays section of the show for this week.

And CUNY epidemiology professor Dennis Nash from the School of Public Health is now in their crosshairs. He's been

studying things like how to help people with anxiety and depression resist vaccine disinformation.

That grant has now been canceled. And on the climate track, he's been studying the

effects of extreme weather events on the medical outcomes of people with HIV, among other things.

Professor Nash joins me now. Thanks for coming on. Welcome back to WNYC. Thanks, Brian. Great to be here.

Tell us about your canceled grant in more detail than I gave.

What were your study?

Well, we had done some research in a cohort that we set up at CUNY, a national cohort,

that basically was tracking a bunch of different outcomes, including vaccinations,

once vaccines became available.

And we learned pretty early that there were things like

common mental disorders like anxiety and depression were associated with lower vaccination

rates, even among people who had been vaccinated previously. And we also learned that among those

with mental health symptoms, they were more likely to state as reasons for not being

up to date on vaccines, things that we knew were, you know, part of disinformation campaigns

and part of misinformation. And so clearly these campaigns were getting to them more than others,

although they were getting to everyone.

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