Serious Diseases Are Spreading Throughout US. Where Is The CDC?
This post was originally published on this site
The CDC previously had effective ways to reach the public, including newsletters and social media. Millions of Americans knew what was happening and were informed about how to get screened for chronic illnesses, like cancers. Since Trump’s inauguration, all of that has changed, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has gone silent.
NPR reports:
Cases of measles, salmonella, listeria and hepatitis A and C have spread throughout the country. More than 100 million Americans continue to suffer from chronic diseases like diabetes and breast cancer. The decline in the agency’s communication could put people at risk, said four current and former CDC workers, three of whom NPR is allowing to remain anonymous because they are still employed by the CDC and believe they may be punished for speaking out.
If only someone — anyone — had warned us that this was the plan all along, and alerted us to Project 2025.
One CDC worker told the outlet, “We are functionally unable to operate communications. We feel like our hands are tied behind our backs.”
Before Trump was inaugurated, the CDC managed most of its communication. HHS, the agency that oversees the CDC and more than 20 divisions and agencies, rarely reviewed the content in CDC social media posts or newsletters, CDC workers said.
That allowed the CDC to communicate quickly and often.
“The whole goal is to say, this is what we know. And here are the best recommendations from experts in the field,” said Dr. Jodie Guest, a professor and senior vice chair of the Department of Epidemiology at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health. “And this is the best advice about the way the general population should handle things in order to protect their health.”
That changed abruptly.
But now, many of those messages have stopped being sent out. Changes to communication at the CDC began shortly after Trump was inaugurated in January, when HHS instructed the CDC and other health agencies to pause any sort of collaboration with people outside the agency.
“So at that point we stopped pretty much all communications,” said a CDC employee who works at the agency.
…The consequences could be deadly, experts said.
“When you have an outbreak of something like listeria, if you are a person who is pregnant and you consume food items that might have listeria in it that CDC should be warning you about, you run the risk of the baby that you are carrying dying,” said Guest. “And so that information needs to get out there.”
What a disgrace:
On April 1, thousands of federal health workers were laid off as part of the government’s “reduction in force.” Communication professionals at the CDC were not spared. Almost everyone at the CDC whose primary job was to communicate with the press was laid off, in addition to almost everyone whose job it was to provide records to the public. Every member of the CDC’s division of digital media was also told their jobs would be eliminated, workers at the CDC said.
“All the points of contact that we generally rely on to communicate with the American people have either been eliminated or dramatically reduced,” said Griffis, the former CDC communications director.
Current CDC workers told NPR that they were surprised to see the CDC’s main Xitter account post a tweet for the first time in a week, but they considered the post about Secretary Kennedy to be akin to “propaganda.”
A president’s job is to keep Americans safe, and Trump has failed to do so on every level, but hey, at least he got his luxury Qatari jet, so all is good, right?