Outside an emergency room in New York, April 2020. | Photo: Justin Lane / EPA / Keystone

Eric Reinhart is a clinical psychoanalyst and freelance researcher based in Chicago. He’s recently published an article in the journal Nature in which he vehemently disagrees with the notion that researchers ought to stay politically neutral. Given the low average life expectancy in the United States, despite it having the highest healthcare spending per capita by far in the world, Reinhart argues that its healthcare experts may not remain indifferent to poverty and deficient social services. But he also points out that they failed to hold Joe Biden accountable, which in turn makes their justified criticism of Donald Trump’s cuts appear partisan. “A medical field that’s focused on treating illness as a substitute for preventing it through public policies now laments the supposed intrusion of politics into health”, he writes.