From WNYC Studios, I'm Brian Lerer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Tuesday, May 27th.

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

and 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 campaigns. And so clearly these

campaigns were getting to them more than others, although they were getting to everyone.

And so we designed a study and wrote a new NIH grant to do a randomized trial where we would

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