Today is President’s Day…what better time to provide an update on the way the current Presidential Administration is impacting the health of everyone in the United States, now and for years to come? It’s hard to believe I last updated on Thursday, because a LOT has happened since my last update. Here are just a few key things you should know:
–Surely you heard RFK Jr. was confirmed as the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Maybe you’re happy because you know that he cares about getting additives out of our food, and you don’t like those things either. (The quality of our food in the US *is* pretty dismal compared to most other countries, so I can get behind policies that improve our food options.) Maybe you wish it didn’t happen, but you can’t really imagine it could be *that* bad. Well food additives aside, it *will* be that bad—that’s a whole update in it itself. Three days ago, after his confirmation, more than 5,000 workers at NIH, CDC, and other HHS agencies were terminated. Many were junior employees, but not all: senior employees who had been recently converted to staff positions after years as contractors, and division directors recently promoted…most of those were terminated, too. This indiscriminate gutting of our public health system will result in program closures, shutter research trials, and make us more vulnerable to disease outbreaks. If you didn’t like the way the US government handled the COVID pandemic, well, our ability to respond to these types of things just got a LOT worse.
–Even if the firing of a huge portion of our federal health and human service workforce doesn’t concern you, you should know that one of the first things RFK Jr. has done is to go after antidepressants. He’s looking into any “threat posed by the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors.” Those are what’s known as SSRIs, and include Lexapro, Prozac, Zoloft, and similar antidepressants, which now help more than 1 in 10 adults in the US stave off depression, anxiety, and thoughts of suicide. RFK Jr. calls people who take those drugs “addicts” and Elon Musk claimed (falsely) in 2023 that people who take SSRIs are more likely to become school shooters. An Executive Order issued Thursday requires the new Make America Healthy Again Commission to submit a report within 100 days that will, among other things, “assess the prevalence of and threat posed by the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, stimulants, and weight-loss drugs.” If you or any of your loved ones have benefitted recently from a prescription for Lexapro, Ritalin, or Ozempic, well, this is about you. Concern about the “threat” these medications cause is #3 on the priority list, per this executive order. RFK Jr. has big plans for remaking our health systems, and he has widespread support within this government to do it.
–Outside of HHS, Scott Turner, the new Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, announced 10 days ago that HUD will no longer enforce the 2016 Equal Access Rule. This rule requires shelters and other HUD-funded programs to ensure anyone in need could access these programs regardless of their gender identity. Now, according to Turner, HUD staff will “halt any pending or future enforcement actions” related to the Equal Access Rule, which he claims tied programs and shelters to “far-left gender ideology.” Why does this matter? LGBTQ youth are more than twice as likely to experience homelessness than their heterosexual peers. One in three trans people will be homeless at some point in their lifetime. We live in a place where trans people are kicked out of their home, alienated from their family, and even tortured and killed (like Sam Nordquist, a 24-year old who was tortured in NY for two horrific months before being murdered and left in a field last week). Giving people safe access to shelter when they have nowhere to go is a fundamental necessity. Going out of your way to say that we care more about “restoring biological truth to the federal government” than making sure ALL youth have access to a safe place to sleep is just cruel, it’s not about making anyone safer or spending taxpayer dollars more responsibly.
–One thing you might have heard that did NOT happen is the firing of the entire first year of the Epidemic Intelligence Service, or EIS. I want to be clear about that, because spreading rumor doesn’t help anyone, and undermines the movement to resist the changes that will hurt so many of us. Yes, that’s what the EIS officers were informed would happen, but then the axe never came on Friday. (On Saturday, though, all civilian members of the Laboratory Leadership Service, the lab-focused sister program of EIS, were indeed dismissed.) Some people think EIS was saved because there was a leak to the media, and someone high up in the power structure intervened at the last minute. That’s a great sign, if true: YOUR VOICE DOES MATTER. Why am I calling out EIS as critical to preserve, even as so much else is being swept out to sea? EIS officers are our first line of defense when infectious disease outbreaks threaten the lives of people in the US (and often internationally). Remember Dr. Erin Mears, the character Kate Winslet played in the movie Contagion? She was an EIS officer. We should be proud of the fact that we have epidemiologists at CDC who are so well-trained and so fearless that they run towards an outbreak and figure out how to save lives. And you can bet this matters, now: the First Clade IB mpox virus infection was just identified in the Americas in San Mateo County, California, a county of almost ¾ of a million people right in the heart of the San Francisco Bay Area. This matters because Clade I infections have been associated with a much higher case fatality rate than the Clade II infections that have been 100% of the US cases until now. Not to mention our good friend bird flu, now up to 68 human cases nationwide, including in California, Texas, Louisiana, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Missouri, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Call your representatives today to help it stay this way. Tell them we NEED EIS officers (and their counterparts in laboratories, running samples to figure out what’s happening) to keep us safe!
–One last important note to build on my last post about where to access missing/altered data: The Center for Health Data Science at the Boston University School of Public Health has developed a new website, www.FindLostData.org, designed to make it easy for anyone to locate datasets previously hosted on government websites. They are committed to keeping it regularly updated as our access to data changes. There’s also the newly formed Data Rescue Project ( https://www.datarescueproject.org/ ) helping to coordinate all these efforts, and what’s been already rescued, vs. where help is still needed to intervene. Should this be necessary, for a group of people at universities and health departments to develop these types of resources to help ensure the flow of scientific, health-related information continues in the United States? Absolutely not. You should be terrified of what it says about our government, our freedom of speech, and our access to un-censored information in this country. I am terrified of this, and at the same time I’m extending real gratitude to the public health researchers and workers who are scrambling to preserve whatever we can. Imagine if this time could be spent actually doing the research or service provision they all got into this field to provide, to make people healthier. Our energy is being redirected to the wrong things, and this is no accident.