Public health is under assault in the United States. The current administration is dismantling public health infrastructure and shifting away from evidence-based policies, leaving every American and people worldwide less safe.
For 80 years, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an agency I led for 8 years, has been a beacon of health protection for the United States and the world. That beacon is now in grave danger of being extinguished. Funding for the CDC is slated to be cut drastically and 2,000 staff, including most top leaders of the agency, have either resigned or been fired. Essential programs in heart disease and stroke prevention, injury prevention, sexually transmitted infection prevention and control, and many other areas have been severely weakened or eliminated.
CDC’s Office of Smoking and Health, eliminated in April, led to the reduction of smoking rates from 42.60% in 1965 to 11.6% in 2022, preventing millions of deaths from lung cancer, heart disease, and stroke. Tobacco remains the leading cause of preventable death in the United States, making this program's elimination by an administration whose stated goal is to “Make America Healthy Again” particularly contradictory.
This spring, the state of Wisconsin requested help to address lead poisoning. But because all experts in lead poisoning had been fired, for likely the first time in history, CDC was not able to respond to a request for assistance from a state.
Recall that in the spring, when the state of Wisconsin requested CDC assistance to manage a wave of lead poisoning cases, the agency was, likely for the first time in its history, unable to respond: all CDC lead experts had been dismissed.
Last month, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. summarily fired CDC director Susan Monarez less than a month into her tenure, reportedly due to her refusal to rubber-stamp vaccine recommendations from the new vaccine advisory panel. Other CDC leaders resigned in protest.
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