What a Kamala Harris Presidency Would Imply for Science
Because the daughter of a most cancers researcher, Kamala Harris would convey a lifelong familiarity with science to the presidency, specialists say
US Vice President Kamala Harris arrives on the South Garden of the White Home in Washington, DC on July 22, 2024. President Biden has endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to take his place within the November election.
Brendan Smialowski/AFP through Getty Pictures
After US president Joe Biden ended his re-election marketing campaign on Sunday, he and different senior Democratic politicians threw their assist behind vice-president Kamala Harris. Though the scenario may change between now and the official number of the Democratic candidate for the presidency in August, she is broadly anticipated to face off in opposition to former president Donald Trump this November.
Right here, Nature talks to coverage analysts and researchers about what a possible Harris administration would possibly imply for science, well being and the atmosphere.
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Well being and science have been part of Harris’s life since an early age: her mom, Shyamala Gopalan, who Harris cites as a significant affect, was a number one breast-cancer researcher who died of most cancers.
A lot of Harris’s profession has centered on prison justice – she served because the district legal professional for San Francisco for seven years after which California’s legal professional normal for six years till 2017 when she was elected as a US senator for the state.
As senator, Harris co-sponsored efforts to enhance the range of the science, know-how, engineering and drugs (STEM) workforce. She launched laws to assist college students from underrepresented populations to acquire jobs and work expertise in STEM fields. And as a candidate within the race for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, she proposed a plan to take a position $60 billion to fund traditionally Black universities and bolster Black-owned companies.
As vice-president, Harris has overseen the Nationwide House Council, which is charged with advising the president on US area coverage and technique. Below Harris’s management, the physique has centered on worldwide cooperation, for instance on the Artemis mission, which goals to ship astronauts to the Moon.
It’s nonetheless unclear who Harris will select to be her working mate if she receives the get together nomination. One contender is Mark Kelly, an Arizona Senator and former astronaut, who would convey his a long time of expertise in science and engineering to the place if chosen.
Healthcare and drug pricing
Through the 2020 Democratic main race, Harris was to Biden’s left on healthcare coverage. For one, she endorsed a common single-payer nationwide medical health insurance system — which nonetheless included a task for personal insurance coverage corporations — whereas Biden most well-liked tweaking the prevailing system, which he had helped to engineer as vice-president.
It’s nonetheless unknown whether or not she’s going to embrace these sorts of progressive well being insurance policies or select a path that could be extra interesting to impartial and centrist voters, says Alina Salganicoff, director for girls’s well being coverage on the health-policy analysis group KFF, based mostly in San Francisco, California. “I anticipate she’s going to be a staunch defender of sustaining and supporting the Inexpensive Care Act, which has additionally been a precedence for the Biden marketing campaign,” she says.
The Biden-Harris administration has additionally made drug pricing a key precedence by making a cap for the worth of insulin and by endorsing using ‘march-in rights’, by which the federal government may intervene to set the worth of improvements created utilizing public funds. In 2019, Harris co-sponsored laws that might have created an impartial company to find out acceptable drug costs.
Peter Maybarduk, director of the entry to medicines programme on the advocacy group Public Citizen, based mostly in Washington DC, praised these actions, and stated he hoped they might proceed underneath a possible Harris administration, “The Biden-Harris administration has been by far the strongest but in difficult outrageous drug costs and beginning the nation down an extended highway towards drugs affordability,” he says.
Girls’s well being
Harris has been extra vocal than Biden on abortion rights. Final December, she launched a nationwide reproductive freedoms tour, by which she turned the primary US vice-president to ever go to an abortion supplier.
This has been a significant challenge for voters within the US, with 63% of the inhabitants saying that abortion needs to be authorized in all or most circumstances based on a ballot by the Pew Analysis Heart in Washington DC. Help for abortion rights, after they had been dramatically curtailed by the Dobbs v. Jackson Girls’s Well being Group choice in 2022, is believed to have fueled essential Democratic wins prior to now 12 months. “The truth that she’s keen to speak about that is going to be monumental, as a result of that is a successful challenge for Democrats,” says Melissa Murray, an skilled in reproductive rights at New York College, in New York Metropolis. “It is a main level of differentiation between the 2 events and the one who could make that case most clearly to the American public, I feel will likely be in a stronger place.”
Harris’s method to reproductive justice will not be restricted to entry to contraception and abortion, Murray notes. The vice-president has advocated for maternal well being points extra broadly, highlighting the necessity to fight implicit bias in opposition to black ladies in healthcare. This method “takes critically the wants of ladies of coloration, who’re maybe extra deeply affected by assaults on reproductive freedom, as we have seen within the two years since Dobbs,” Murray says.
Local weather and atmosphere
Harris has lengthy promoted motion on local weather in addition to environmental justice, says Leah Stokes, a climate-policy researcher on the College of California, Santa Barbara. As a district legal professional in San Francisco after which legal professional normal for the state of California, Harris turned a champion for communities on the entrance traces of fossil gas air pollution, Stokes says. Harris adopted an identical path with work on public well being and the atmosphere as a senator from 2017-2021.
If she prevails in November, Harris is predicted to keep up each the momentum and the unprecedented investments that Biden has injected into the local weather motion in the US. This consists of upwards of US$1 trillion in funding for clear vitality and local weather change over a decade, a legislative accomplishment that many vitality specialists say may sharply cut back US greenhouse gasoline emissions over the approaching a long time.
“Harris and Biden are in lockstep on local weather, and that is precisely what we want,” says Stokes. “Our 2030 targets are proper across the nook, and we will not afford to roll again progress for 4 extra years.”
