Whatever your politics, this is clear: The Trump presidency is coming to an end. When the word came that the Michigan results had been certified, I talked with my brother Craig Neckers, a lawyer in Grand Rapids, Mich. “There’s a tension lifted from the people here,” he said. Finally, the endless campaign was over.

But the pandemic is not.

Donald Trump’s last year in office will forever be marked by the legacy of COVID-19, a raging virus that will have killed at least 300,000 Americans and have sickened 20 million more before he leaves office. There is still no cure. Nor, despite recent hopeful signs, is there an approved and effective vaccine — at least not yet.

While we want miracles, we have to be a little prudent and conservative with our hopes. News releases don’t make successful vaccines. Laboratories do.

We need to face something else too. Not only was the average American not ready for a viral disease of such consequence – our great research establishments were totally unprepared. The federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the rest of the national medical establishment weren’t ready.

The federal government’s best attempt came from Dr. Anthony Fauci, the longtime head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a division of NIH. He became the most seen and most respected spokesman for efforts to fight the disease. The second best known medical spokesman was Dr. Deborah Birx, the United States’ Global AIDS Coordinator for more than a decade and who, for whatever reason, was named response coordinator for the White House Coronavirus Task Force. How good they were is debatable. But what is clear is that neither had any resources capable of fighting a new, humanity-threatening virus.

The virus exposed other glaring weaknesses in our society, and here’s one that hasn’t gotten enough attention: The immigration policies of the Trump administration have been devastating for American scientific research. This began long before 2020.

Why didn’t we just ramp up our research the way we did at the beginning of World War II when the coronavirus began exploding? Simple: The scientists and science students just aren’t there – because we didn’t let them in! Chemical and Engineering News reported in mid-November that enrollments of international students in advanced programs in engineering, chemistry and molecular biology were down as much as 43 percent.

In fairness, Trump’s ‘wall’ wasn’t intended to keep potential Ph. D. students from studying in American universities. But there is a law of unintended consequences, and they have certainly done just that. Restrictive immigration policies begun in earlier administrations were ramped up disastrously by Donald Trump to a point that they diminished, in a large and dangerous way, the numbers of scientists from other countries seeking a graduate education here.

How much sense does it make that the stream of scientists that could be heading to research labs in America to help work on fighting this virus have been denied to us?

Sadly, we’ve been harmed by more than just ridiculous immigration policies. The last four years have done vast damage to our reputation abroad.

This has had led to disastrous results for America. Increased tensions sparked by our country caused Iran to accidentally shoot down a Ukrainian airliner bound for Canada in January, killing 176 people. Iran’s jittery military thought it was an American cruise missile. While that got considerable publicity, few noticed that a prominent young chemist and six outstanding graduate chemistry students bound for North American universities died in the crash. What happened to them hasn’t made it easy to recruit others.

I’ve had two teaching careers. One was at Hope College, a small school in western Michigan. At the time Hope, had an extraordinary record in producing young persons that pursued scientific careers. So I interacted with, and learned from, young research students who became distinguished professors as they, and their careers matured. One of my former students was so successful that two chemistry buildings at two different academic institutions are named in his honor. My other career was at Bowling Green State University where I found an opportunity to develop a research initiative and Ph D. program that would lead to the development of digital imaging. We knew and worked on ways to convert color to print digitally in the early 1980’s. We also were in on the beginnings of what is now called 3-D printing.

The first printed MRI of a human heart was created in my labs at Bowling Green’s Center for Photochemical Sciences in 1988. The doctoral students with whom I worked there were almost entirely born in other nations. They were all what those born here call “aliens.”

Most, in fact, were from former communist countries. Now these young scientists are the best in their fields. They are more American than many people born here, because they chose to come and endured hardships to live the dream. And these young persons have!

They are presidents of companies in northwest Ohio and elsewhere that employ hundreds if not thousands of workers. Today the companies for which they work are not only contributing to testing for the virus, but also to analytical methods that will determine the molecular compositions needed for the coming vaccines.

Today, most of the contributions to solving the problems of the coronavirus don’t seem to be coming from universities. Could that be because university research programs have been severely damaged by Trump’s immigration policies?

That may be part of it. But our weakness in this field also is due to decades in which our government was far more interested in funding research designed to build bigger bombs than research that could benefit the health of human beings.

We hope that a new era soon will begin in Washington, with an administration that has its priorities straight, is willing to listen to experts, and not politicize science or our health.

But the federal government can’t, and shouldn’t, do it alone. The states have to get with the project too. And there’s nowhere better to start than right here.

So I would say to the boards of all our local universities: Come on! Your fellow citizens need your help in solving life-threatening problems that won’t end even if and when COVID-19 is vanquished. Do your part to provide leadership that strengthens research here to levels of national excellence, by rebuilding our strengths and creating new opportunities.

We can get past the darkness – if we are willing to try.

Dr. Douglas Neckers is a McMaster Distinguished Research Professor (emeritus) and a 67-year Chautauqua Lake resident.