By Bob Hennelly

On this 22nd anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center which killed close to 3,000 people, we look at the public health fallout from U.S. EPA and New York City officials telling the world the air was "safe to breathe" following the attack when testing actually showed it was not. 

Thousands more have died following the initial attack from their exposure to that toxic air.

In this episode, we hear about the gender healthcare disparities existing within the 9/11 World Trade Center Health Program, which was set up to assist first responders who were mostly male with automatic annual free health screenings. By contrast, civilian survivors must first show symptoms of suspected World Trade Center ailments to qualify.

We are joined by Anne Marie Principe, who owned a small business adjacent to the World Trade Center, and Lila Nordstrom, who was a senior at New York City’s Stuyvesant High School that was also next door to the Twin Towers. In the years since the Sept. 11, 2001 attack, these two women have become passionate advocates for the 9/11 community, first responder and civilian survivors alike, who were all victimized by a government that was determined to open nearby Wall Street at any cost — including the lives of thousands who lived, studied, and worked in the toxic zone after the attack.

In the second half of the show, we will get an update from Judy Danella, president of the United Steelworkers Nurses Local 4-200, who have been on strike for safe staffing at the Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick., NJ. Judy is joined in solidarity by Fran Ehret, the executive director of the CWA of New Jersey which represents 70,000 working families, including tens of thousands of state, county, and local public employees who were on the front lines of the pandemic along with the nurses.

"RWJ is spending millions of dollars on scab nurses and they are staffing the scab nurses at a higher level than the nurse’s union has demanded at the bargaining table," Ehret says. "Why waste money like that rather than give their nurses a fair raise, and work with the union to ensure safe staffing levels so that patients are well-cared for, and they are prepared in the event we get hit with another pandemic or similar health emergency in the future? To me it looks like they want to break these nurses and break their union."

Listen to the entire program below: