On Tuesday, U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff held a virtual press conference with Georgia public health experts to express the importance of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) following President Trump’s executive order directing agencies to remove their websites and data with the CDC.
Ossoff explained that his reason for the press conference was to “sound the alarm” on the threat to public health in Georgia, the country, and around the world “posed by unprecedented partisan political attacks on the CDC.”
“You all know the CDC is based right here in Georgia — it employs 15,000 Georgians,” he said, “defending the American people from disease, defending public health in the United States. And what we’ve seen over the last few weeks is unprecedented and unacceptable.
“We have seen an unprecedented suspension of morbidity and mortality data. Data that has been consistently reported since the 1930s. Still now after nearly a month, public reporting of data about avian influenza is suspended as bird flu rips through flocks of chickens across the country and has been documented in transmission to humans.”
A federal judge ordered the CDC, Department of Health and Human services, and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to restore the website pages and data that were removed under the executive order on Tuesday.
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Ossoff also highlighted current concerns over the CDC’s workforce.
“We’re hearing threats to drastically cut the CDC’s workforce and budget at a time when not just Georgians, but the entire country needs the world’s flagship public health agency to be firing on all cylinders to defend the nation,” he said, “to defend American families and the American economy from threats posed by infectious disease.”
Ossoff’s answer to why public information has not been updated on the CDC site is because public health has been politicized.
“Public health should not be political,” Ossoff said. “Public health should not be partisan. And my message is clear. The Trump administration needs to cease its political attacks on the CDC, on the CDC workforce in Georgia, and on public health.”
Joining Ossoff were Georgia public health experts Jeffery Koplan, former director of the CDC; Anne Schuchat, former CDC principal deputy director from 2015 to 2021 and former acting CDC director; and Daniele Fallin, James W. Curran Dean of Public Health at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health.
Schuchat explained that the mission of the CDC is always to protect Americans.
“The mission of CDC is not partisan,” she said. “I worked at CDC more than 30 years for four Republican administrations and three Democratic administrations, and the mission was forever to protect Americans from threats to their health, whether they are infectious or whether they arise at home or abroad, whether their natural or manmade. And of course, we’ve seen all of that, all of those kinds of threats during my tenure.
“We’ve tackled the leading causes of illness, disability, injury and death, and provide early warnings about threats to the health of the nation with vital data and reports,” she added.
She says that the people of the CDC are not only disease detectives and data scientists, but “your neighbors,” helping the health and economy of Georgia.
An example she gives of the work of the CDC is the organization stopping an outbreak of lung injuries affecting younger people using vapes.
“Over 2,800 lung injuries related to contaminated vaping cartridges — 68 deaths, including six Georgians,” she said. “The type of expertise needed to stop that kind of outbreak is laboratory epidemiology, communications, logistics and vitally support to state and local public health who do the frontline work.”
Ossoff posed questions related to what will happen if the CDC is “gutted” or “subjected to political interference” in his request to the Trump administration to let the CDC continue to protect Americans.
“Who is going to defend the nation from Ebola?” he said. “Who is going to defend American children from measles? Who is going to defend us from tuberculosis?”
This article comes to Now Habersham in partnership with GPB News
