Several maternal and infantile health programs have been eliminated or dug in the context of the ministry of Health And the dismissals of social services (HHS), causing an alarm and disbelief among the defenders who work to make the Americans healthier.
Fear and anxiety come as a complete accounting of the cuts remains elusive. Federal health officials have only published large descriptions of modifications to be made, rather than detailed accounting of the programs and departments eviscerated.
“Pediatricians, including me, lose sleep at night – worried about the health of children of the nation,” said Dr. Sue Kressly, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
“The one who stands out is the maternal and infantile health office. There is no way to make our country healthier by eliminating the expertise where it all starts, and it all starts with maternal and child health. ”
Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr announced that HHS would eliminate 10,000 jobs as part of a restructuring plan. With the cuts already made by the “Ministry of Elon Musk’s government”, HHS is likely to lose 20,000 workers – about a quarter of his workforce.
“We don’t just reduce bureaucratic sprawl”, ” Kennedy said. “We realign the organization with its main mission and our new priorities in the inversion of the chronic disease epidemic.”
Fragment and provisional information, which has filled the vacuum left by the lack of information from the health service, seem to show maternal health programs provided for elimination, many of which without indicating if they will be reassigned. The Guardian asked HHS to comment on the cuts but did not receive an answer.
The photo of the cuts was still muddy on Thursday when Kennedy told journalistsAccording to Politico: “We are going to make 80% discounts, but 20% of these will have to be reinstalled, because we will make mistakes.”
In the aftermath of the height of the COVVI-19 pandemic, there have been many conservative criticisms of public health agencies, in particular the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Pandemic policy continue to be a Animated strength Within the Republican Party, whose supporters are cynical as to the value of federal public health programs after federal vaccine mandates.
Maternal health programs can serve a second objective for Republicans.
Such programs have be under fire In some conservative states, in part because the experts involved inquire about the deaths that could have been prevented with abortion services – now illegal or severely limited in Nearly two dozen conservative states.
As part of the restructuring, the administration announced that 28 divisions would be folded in 15, including the creation of a new division, called “Administration for a healthy America”, or “AHA”.
Administration argued that “centralization” “would improve the coordination of health resources for low-income Americans and focus on areas such as primary care, maternal and child health, mental health, environmental health, HIV / AIDS and the development of labor”.
Meanwhile, HIV / AIDS experts, workers’ health and safety, health care for the most vulnerable in the company, and maternal and child health experts received “strength reduction” opinions, a federal term for layoffs or were placed on administrative leave while waiting to be eliminated.
“It certainly seems that the emphasis was placed on parts of HHS which treated the health of women or reproduction,” said Sean Tipton, director of policies of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, on the cuts.
He added: “How in the world, you can justify the CDC by eliminating the division of maternal mortality exceeds me.”
Among the harshly affected divisions were the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), an operational division of HHS like the CDC, which housed the maternal and child health office. Hrsa has lost as much as 600 workers.
The CDC’s district health division, which studies maternal health, seemed to have been almost eliminatedAccording to several reports, some of the portfolios of the division also had to be folded in AHA.
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All the staff of a standard maternal mortality survey, a program called the monitoring of pregnancy risk assessment system, has also been put on leave, Stat reported. The epidemiologist in charge of the CDC investigation, Jennifer Bombard, wrote to colleagues on Tuesday: ”