The stakes that gathered along Clifton Road in Atlanta on Tuesday, just outside the keepers of the centers for Disease Control and Prevention, had chosen a familiar land for the furious demonstrators of questions ranging from animal research to vaccines.
But Tuesday’s demonstration was unusual: hundreds of people had gathered to defend the jobs of public health workers, a few days after the CDC began to reduce around 10% of its workforce.
Apart from the Washington, DC, region, few places are more at risk of the Trump administration’s budget ax than the Atlanta concentrated medical corridor, east of the city center, where the CDC, the Emory University and its scientific research empire, and a large Veterans Hospital Hit practically each other. Billions of dollars circulate in campuses each year, helping to employ thousands of people.
But at risk is more than jobs and dollars. It’s stature. A city that has long been proud of business sense and a sacred role in the civil rights movement has also cherished the status which was given to it by its centrality to public health and medical sciences.
“Atlanta really considered herself a world capital in the world – at worst, one of the many world health capitals,” said Dr. Mark Rosenberg, a former CDC official who was the president of the working group non -profit based in Atlanta for Global Health.
Now the potential weakening of the country’s public health system threatens to dig the influence of Atlanta. And for a place like Atlanta, where it is common to see someone with CDC links in the preschool collection line, in the church or in the hair salon, the cuts are tearing to a bastion of generations of shared prestige.
“It made us feel that we were part of an overview,” thought about Todd Ginsberg, owner of General Muir Deli, thought about CDC employees and visitors who flocked to Clifton Road (and his restaurant ). “Having something like the CDC known all over the world, yes, it’s a big problem to have it in front of us, and it’s a great source of pride.”
Thursday evening, During a noisy meeting of the town hall In the easy suburbs of Roswell, about 20 miles north of the CDC, representative Rich McCormick, a republican, supported the White House. During a session where his voters have huated and hué, he suggested twice that licensed CDC employees were doing “duplicity” work of artificial intelligence. The scene echoes at the start Town Hall “Tea Party” from 2009 and 2017 Health Toyals This foreshadowed the reprimands that the voters would give the parties of the presidents the following year.
“I know how they are doing their research,” said McCormick, who is also a doctor about the CDC he added: “I think they could do more with less, just like the Marine Corps and all world does it when you have to do more with less to survive. »»
A participant in the town hall retorted: “Trying to do more with it is reasonable. What is not reasonable is to adopt this approach to chain saw. »»
Public health experts have warned that CDC draconian discounts may have generalized repercussions in the United States and elsewhere. However, with the White House on a apparently blind crusade to reduce federal spending and skeptics of the CDC now in the best ranks of the government, many civil servants are preparing for the possibility of more layoffs, as well as zero budgets and Morale cratégé who could send more people to outings.
In addition, Emory leaders have declared in a message to employees this month that part of the effort to limit federal spending could represent an annual blow of $ 140 million which “could affect almost all Academic units in Emory, with immediate and long -term consequences for our scientific research, our clinical trials, our care for patients and other academic activities. The eminent Emory Faculty of Medicine could be assigned, as is its famous National Primate Research Center.
Through a spokesperson, the president of the university, Gregory L. Fenves, refused an interview request, but declared in a public letter on February 11 that there would be “probably more ‘Funding adjustments to the federal level in the coming weeks and months ”.
The CDC opened its doors in 1946, when it was called the brandable Disease Center, as part of a government effort to combat malaria. The agency was based in Atlanta because the southeast of mosquitoes was a hot spot for parasitic disease. The following year, the CDC paid $ 10, around $ 148 today, for 15 acres to shelter its head office, and as decades progressed, the two became biomedical giants with a global weight , often parallel.
In 2014, for example, CDC officials were deeply involved in the fight against the Ebola epidemic in Africa. After the American humanitarian workers contracted the virus, they were transported from Liberia to Georgia and led by Ambulance on Clifton Road, after the CDC offices and in a specialized district of Emory.
During an address at a local Rotary Club meeting last year, Dr. Mandy Cohen, then director of the CDC, noted that she had managed the only major federal agency based outside Washington, Maryland or from Virginia. More than 10,000 CDC employees, she said, were in the Atlanta region.
“If you have transformed our budget and our economic imprint into a listed company on the stock market, we would be in the top 5 companies here in Atlanta,” added Dr Cohen – not a small assertion in an area that boasts of houses Coca- cola, Delta Air Lines, Home Depot and UPS.
“This is one of our crown jewels,” Senator Jon Ossoff, Democrat of Georgia said on Thursday. “Everyone knows that we host the World Public Health Organization and the best epidemiologists in the world who protect our country and the world.”
For the CDC, in particular, the political skirmishes have come and disappeared throughout its history. For current and former officials, some of whom have spoken of the state of anonymity because they feared reprisals, emerging confrontations with the Trump administration feel much clearer, partly because there is if Little clarity on how they will take place.
Mr. Trump faced the CDC civil servants During the Covid-19 pandemic In his first mandateand the bad will to The extreme right only ordered since then. The employees have spoken today about the fear, confusion and lack of communication of the leaders of their future.
Neither the Ministry of Health and Social Services nor the CDC responded to requests for comments.
Governor Brian Kemp, a Republican, has so far displayed little public alarm on changes in one of the first employers in Georgia.
“I know they have dismissals at the CDC and other things, but, you know, the government can bear a little leap to rationalize its operations.
Mr. Ossoff, who is ready to be re-elected next year and could face a challenge by Mr. Kemp, said that he was “deeply stupid, self-deficit and dangerous” to undermine the CDC
“How can the governor of Georgia not defend one of the jewels of the Crown of Georgia, an essential public health asset for the whole country, and the extraordinary people who work there?” Mr. Ossoff asked.
Other defenders of the CDC argued that the cost for Atlanta would be greater than any financial economy, because the agency, according to them, is as much a reputation and academic and economic force.
The CDC “helps to make Atlanta the city it is,” said Dr. Louis W. Sullivan, from Atlanta who was the founding president of the Morehouse School of Medicine and Secretary of Health during the George HW Bush administration. “This adds quality to the city which differentiates it from any other city in the country.”
Mr. Ginsberg said that he and his partners had chosen the location of their restaurant in part because the workers of the CDC and Emory “had traveled and experienced a large part of the culture that we were trying to bring to Atlanta” . He remembers with emotion the way CDC employees fortified his restaurant in the first days of the pandemic while filling up with gift cards. Now he said he was already losing business when agency officials had canceled the events.
“I cannot imagine anyone in government or wherever he can want to get rid of this agency,” he said, adding: “I am I hope optimistic that the CDC will remain exactly where it is.”
Current and ancient employees of the CDC are home to the same hopes. But veterans like Dr. Rosenberg, who attributes his 1999 departure from the CDC to a battle with the Republicans on public health policy, fear that the cuts of this era accelerate an exodus of talent of Atlanta, exhausting the region intellectual power and international influence.
He is particularly concerned about whether the agency and the city will be able to attract the next generation of scientists.
“Someone outside who have employment possibilities that pay much more than public health,” he said unfortunately, “I cannot imagine why he would come to the CDC”