On a sunny day during the week in Atlanta, a small crowd of people gathered for a gathering outside a headquarters of work.
The event, set up by the American Democratic Region of the Atlanta region. Nikema WilliamsWas mainly assisted by members of the union and recently dismissed federal workers, including Ryan Sloane.
“I was dismissed by an anonymous email at 9 p.m. in the middle of a vacation weekend,” he said.
Sloane is still looking for reinstatement, but he feels that he has much more to lose by speaking.
“I’m only here today because they can’t fire me twice,” said Sloane.
When he received his notice of dismissal, he was a few months in a job as a specialist in public affairs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
At the CDC, his days have been spent updating local television journalists, radio and local distant newspapers on threats such as seasonal flu, measles and food security in their communities.
A judge has ordered reinstatement of some federal employees dismissed, at least temporarily. But their work is still at stake.
Sloane said that his former CDC colleagues whose work is not yet in the limbo was afraid.
“They are terrified that the work of their lives will be deleted from servers and not supported because it does not behave with the ideologies of the new administration,” he said. “No one benefits.”
From the end of January to mid-February, the Trump administration offline Some CDC web pages and frozen external communications, including its widely read reading Weekly ratio of morbidity and mortality Epidemiological digest.
The web pages that have been deleted included CDC public health reports, data sets and advice on infectious diseases and sexual health. After a court order, Some agency information has been restored, at least for the moment.
But even the temporary disturbances of CDC communications could have major training effects.
This is information on which local health services and health services, hospitals, university researchers and others count to help them respond to epidemics.
“CDC is there to provide technical information, finance, provide support, but it is collaborative work, working together to ensure the safety of the Americans,” said former CDC director Tom Frieden, who directed the agency from 2009 to 2017. He is now president and chief executive officer of non -profit organization of non -profit organization Resolve lives. “In this country, we have a patchwork or a public health network. It is really to local services, city and state health to do work. ”
City and state health agencies also need the collaboration of CDC experts to help investigate local epidemics of diseases and other threats to public health.
A clinician who worked at the agency for more than two decades highlighted the singular capacity of the CDC to send medical supplies and deploy teams of highly specialized scientists to help local communities identify and contain epidemics. Kff Health News agreed not to use the name of the clinician because she fears that she will be dismissed to publicly disseminate these opinions.
“Many of them are assigned to the health services of states and premises, therefore really beyond individual positions, any reduction in financing that the agency also takes is adopted to the health and premises health services,” said the clinician. “Much of their budget also comes from federal money.”
The Trump administration has attempted to end hundreds of CDC employees, as well as hundreds of additional workers at the National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies with a health and safety role in the United States.
Many researchers in public health and science are concerned with the impacts of the country’s ability to respond to threats – and on the question of whether public and local health services will be able to keep communities healthy without the partnership of the CDC.
Billionaire Elon Musk said his Government Department of Effectiveness In order to continue to reduce budgets and federal agencies, targeting what she calls “fraud”.
“Whenever someone is dismissed, it’s always difficult. But with 36 billions of dollars and Wabe During a visit in March at the Georgia State Capitol.
His district Includes parts of the Atlanta suburbs at around 30 miles from the CDC headquarters.
Greene also chairs a sub-comity of the house also called “DOGE”, to “deliver the effectiveness of the government”.
“Fortunately, with all the investments that are brought back to the country under President Trump, I really hope that these federal workers will be able to find new jobs,” she said.
She did not comment whether local public health services across the country could work effectively without the support of CDC experts who have been dismissed.
But many experts in public health express their concern.
The CDC has long been a key training field for the next generation of American public health researchers.
Epidemiology professor at EMORY University Patrick Sullivan was one of them earlier in his career. The HIV expert previously worked at the CDC for about 15 years.
“When I started working in HIV prevention at the CDC in the early 1990s, we did not have the treatments that essentially allowed people living with HIV to have a full, healthy and normal lifespan,” he said. “We did not have the treatments that essentially allowed people living with HIV to take a test that people could bring home to test.”
Sullivan has said that the progress he has seen in recent decades have given him optimism, and that progress in HIV treatment and prevention are an excellent example of the importance of federal support for public health work.
“The science of discoveries and the pharmacy sciences have really given us the tools we need to put an end to the HIV epidemic in the United States,” he said.
But, to have these scientific tools without adequate public health staff or funding to use them, he said, will cost an American life.
This article comes from a partnership that includes Wabe,, NPRand Kff Health News.
Kff Health News is a national editorial hall that produces in -depth journalism on health problems and is one of the main KFF operating programs – an independent source of research, survey and independent journalism. Learn more about Kff.
Use our contents
This story can be republished for free (details).