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Never leave a man behind. Yesterday, the Hill ran a great story headlined, “NIH launching long-term health studies of East Palestine train crash.” As you may recall, the tiny town of East Palestine, Ohio, was ignored by the Biden Administration after officials blew up a toxic rail car spill, after deciding the best thing to do with a pool of poison was to completely aerosolize it.

The East Palestine disaster began not with a bang, but with the shriek of steel against steel. On February 3, 2023, a Norfolk Southern freight train, a mile and a half long and burdened with hazardous cargo, derailed in the quiet village of East Palestine, Ohio. What followed was not merely an accident— it was a chemical catastrophe cloaked in smoke and bureaucratic silence.

Thirty-eight cars jumped the rails. Eleven of them carried toxic chemicals. The most troubling offender was vinyl chloride, a known carcinogen once used in warfare and now barreling through heartland towns in anonymous tankers. As the wreckage hissed and smoldered, authorities made a fateful choice: a “controlled burn,” they called it. But what the residents saw was something else entirely— a monstrous, black, apocalyptic plume erupting into the sky, visible for miles and etched into memory like a scene from Chernobyl.

Within hours, birds dropped from the sky. Fish floated belly-up in streams. Pets convulsed and died. Meanwhile, the barely concerned Biden Administration insisted everything was “perfectly safe.”

The people of East Palestine were told to return home, to breathe air officials hadn’t tested properly, to drink from wells that reeked of sweet poison. Their health concerns were met with canned answers, their pain with platitudes. The EPA showed up late, Norfolk Southern showed up with stacks of NDAs and trivial offers of hush money, and the press showed up barely at all.

It’s about time they got a lifeline. Secretary Kennedy and NIH Director Bhattacharya explained that the new program will assess the effects of chemical exposure in East Palestine and its surrounding communities, in both the short and long terms. It will also focus on public health tracking and surveillance of the community’s ongoing health conditions.

It was bad news for Norfolk Southern. The study will hopefully provide data that is desperately needed by residents’ lawyers.