Trending
The United States was born out of the basic human desire for freedom and freedom has been at the heart of what it means to be an American since our nation's founding. Freedom, according to Merriam-Webster, is "the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action." As Americans we are free to live where we choose, free to pursue whatever career we like, free to associate with whomever we want.
In the first days of his administration, Donald Trump and his unelected appointees started taking away our freedom of choice by taking away information on which thousands of Americans and people around the world rely. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which still declares itself "the nation's leading science-based, data-driven, service organization that protects the public's health," was immediately silenced.
Just when bird flu is spreading across the country, posing a potentially severe threat to public health and safety, the CDC was prohibited from releasing any information about it under a communications blackout imposed on all federal health websites. The January 23rd issue of Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) was to have been an update on the most recent studies of bird flu but was not published, the first hiatus in the journal's decades-long history.
Doctors, nurses, teachers, scientists, and many others abruptly lost access to this and other publications and data they use every day as they work to improve the health of all Americans.
After a court order, some federal health web pages and data sets were restored. MMWR resumed publication on February 6 with no mention of bird flu, and the February 13 issue includes just one of the previously mentioned studies. Other studies are delayed or missing, and some restored pages bear a disclaimer stating, "This page does not reflect biological reality and therefore the Administration and this Department rejects it." This puts political ideology over science!
We formed Let's end COVID! in early 2021 to give the people in our community trustworthy information about COVID-19. We understand how scientific investigation works. We know that accurate information about communicable diseases such as COVID-19, measles, tuberculosis, HIV-AIDS, and bird flu is essential when people make decisions about their health.
Now there is no way to be sure that the information on federal health websites is accurate or complete. This censorship of government health agencies and scientists creates chaos and destroys trust. It deprives us of our freedom to choose what is best for ourselves and our families by taking away the information necessary for making those decisions. We protest and condemn this and similar reckless actions by the administration. We call on our elected representatives to restore our right to know--and to choose.
GWEN BERNSTINE, LYNN ESTOMIN, MICHAEL GROSS, BARBARA HEMMENDINGER, MICHAEL HEYD, TIMOTHY MAHONEY, CHRISTINA SMITH, JOSEPH SMITH, CHRIS TSAI
Submitted by Virtual Newsroom