BY RICHARD SKOLNIK
White Rock

The staffing and budget cuts that Musk/Trump are taking to the Center for Disease Control (CDC) will do immeasurable harm to the health of Americans and to the health of people globally. These harms will take many years to overcome and must be stopped now.

Eliminating critical personnel and funds will immediately harm CDC’s ability to detect, prevent, and help us respond to infectious disease threats. It will harm our preparedness to deal in a timely manner with the next emerging infectious disease, at a time when vaccination rates are falling and bird flu poses potentially grave risks to us and to others. It will also reduce our ability to stockpile the materials needed to respond quickly to any emergencies that do arise. CDC will also harm CDC’s ability to study harmful viruses and bacteria and to help develop tools for diagnosing them and vaccines and drugs to address them.

CDC provides funding for training America’s disease detectives and lab specialists that support national, state, and local public health efforts. It also provides direct financial support to state and local public health authorities. Cutting CDC will harm our ability at every level of government to prepare for and respond to disease outbreaks. It will also leave us without the personnel we need in the future to combat infectious and noncommunicable diseases.

CDC has been the US link with global disease surveillance activities. Harming CDC’s ability to work with other countries and with international health organizations will make us and the rest of the world more vulnerable to disease threats.

There are thoughtful ways to make all government agencies and other organizations more effective and efficient. However, there is no financial, economic, or health justification for hollowing out CDC as the Musk/Trump chain-saw approach to budget cutting will do. This is NOT getting rid of “waste, fraud, and abuse.” It is simply setting the foundation for us and the rest of the world to be harmed by a range of health risks. It will cost us billions of dollars in social, educational, health, and financial harms that we will pay for many years to come.

Please urgently:

 Call Republican members of Congress to demand they stop the gutting of CDC. Call Democratic members of Congress to demand that they remind Republican members daily that they will be held accountable for the harms to health that will come from irrational cuts to CDC.

 Faith groups should be appalled by the harms and inhumanity that Trump/Musk are imposing on the health of people in the US and overseas. Engage your faith group to also speak loudly on this matter to political leaders.

 Organizations like Rotary have been deeply involved in global health efforts like the Global Polio Eradication Initiative. The many years of support they have given risk “going down the drain,” due to the Musk/Trump approach to “budget cutting.” Engage your local service organizations to speak loudly on this matter to political leaders.

 Donate what you can to legal advocacy organizations like Public Citizen so they can fight Musk/Trump efforts that are illegal.

(Richard Skolnik is the former Director for Health, Nutrition, and Population for South Asia at the World Bank. He was a Lecturer in Global Health at The George Washington University and Yale, where he still holds an appointment, and the Executive Director of a Harvard AIDS treatment program for three countries in Africa. Richard is also the Instructor for the Yale/Coursera course Essentials of Global Health and the author of Global Health 101, Fourth
Edition.)