National Public Health Week is a chance to celebrate how far American public health has come — and to address the ongoing and emerging risks we face. As the nation focuses on this year’s theme, “Ready. Set. Action!”, The Cure Coalition is sounding the alarm on a less-frequently discussed public health crisis: the offshoring of biomedical research and risk to U.S. gold-standard science.
The modern public health victories we now take for granted grew out of rigorous, U.S.-led biomedical research that insisted on careful testing before new treatments reached patients. Breakthroughs in prenatal care, neonatal intensive care, antibiotics, and chronic disease management have extended life expectancy and transformed once fatal diagnoses into manageable conditions. Vaccines turned once common childhood killers like polio and rubella into distant memories and helped drive the global eradication of smallpox. This is what progress looks like when our country treats research as a cornerstone of public health.
But today, that foundation is under strain. The Cure Coalition recognizes a growing research crisis, where essential tools and established approaches are at risk of being replaced by less-proven methods — known as new approach methodologies, or NAMS — due to political pressure. As a result, U.S. research continues to move overseas, which can lead to bypassing some of the critical preclinical work needed to answer basic safety questions before medicines reach the public. When we allow foreign governments to control our research and development pipeline, we lose transparency, independent oversight, and the ability to demand the highest standards for American families.
This is not an abstract concern, but a direct threat to our legacy of public health leadership. A weakened research infrastructure means lifesaving studies of childhood cancers, rare diseases, and complex conditions are delayed, scaled back, or never launched. Families cannot afford a world where their children become the first reliable safety test because proper research was outsourced or abandoned. Offshoring also deepens our dependence on fragile global supply chains, where disruptions abroad show up as medication and supply shortages on U.S. pharmacy shelves and in our hospitals.
National Public Health Week asks us to honor the systems that keep our communities safe. A resilient, transparent, U.S.-based biomedical research ecosystem is one of those systems. It protects patients by demanding evidence, not assumptions; gold standard testing, not shortcuts; and accountability we can actually enforce. This week and every week, The Cure Coalition is calling on policymakers, federal agencies, and all Americans to treat the offshoring of research and erosion of standards as the public health emergency it is. If we act now, we can keep lifesaving innovation — and the responsibility for doing it right — here at home.