Experts: Trump Health Department cuts would acutely impact Atlanta

The cuts would have a negative economic impact on Georgia, since many well-paid jobs could be lost and migrate away from the metro Atlanta area. Public health experts told the AJC the cuts could also mean Atlanta — as home to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, the world’s busiest airport — risks losing a robust network of researchers whose work stops illnesses from entering the U.S. with tourists and Americans returning from trips abroad.

The CDC in Atlanta remains the global reference lab for testing polio samples from countries dealing with the virus, said Mark Pallansch, retired director of the Division of Viral Diseases at the CDC, and who oversaw the domestic measles and polio programs.

Historically that has meant the CDC has analyzed polio samples from around the world as the first step in a multipart plan to stop such viruses from landing with passengers at Atlanta and other American airports.

State and local health agencies would also be impacted, as CDC staff members work at the Georgia Department of Public Health and within the Cobb, Gwinnett, Macon and DeKalb county boards of health. And the CDC provides 95% of the state’s budget to combat HIV.

But Dr. Mark Rosenberg, former assistant surgeon general and rear admiral in the United States Public Health Service, emphasized the overall impact of the cuts would be global — by derailing systems that catch and detain polio and measles outbreaks both here and abroad.

“The administration is making big cuts to the work on polio,” Rosenberg said. “Our withdrawal from the World Health Organization (WHO) and its support for global polio eradication would cause irreparable harm and undo 30 years of work.”

That would be tragic, Rosenberg said, especially given that the cuts were announced nearly 70 years to the day that American scientists invented polio vaccines — which saved tens of millions of lives, prevented disability in countless more and nearly eradicated the disease in all but a handful of countries.

Polio is an illness caused by a virus that mainly affects nerves in the spinal cord or brain stem, leaving many paralyzed. In 1949, during one of the worst outbreaks, 42,000 Americans caught polio, and nearly 3,000 died. By the mid-1960s, vaccines helped to drop the number of cases in the U.S. to nearly zero.

Pallansch told the AJC that health officials working overseas were already being called home after the first round of cuts.

“People who had been working abroad have been coming back,” Pallansch said.

Pallansch says the CDC had sent about 80 Atlanta-based employees to work overseas to track polio and several other viruses. Some are based in Geneva at the World Health Organization and at GAVI, the Global Alliance for Vaccines Immunization. Most have worked in the field in Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Ethiopia, India and China, he said.

He said these federal government employees act as America’s eyes and ears on the ground, allowing officials to see and react to virus outbreaks in real time.

When the polio virus spread from Pakistan to Mozambique in 2022, the CDC’s global surveillance network and the CDC lab in Atlanta were able to establish how the virus moved between continents and then create a plan with local partners to quash it, he said.

“CDC trains and supports other labs in the global network. This comes out of CDC’s budget via a cooperative agreement with WHO,” Pallansch said.

Credit: AJC File

Credit: AJC File

The Trump administration said Wednesday it plans to end U.S. funding for GAVI, which helps buy vaccines for children in poor countries, and will scale back efforts to fight malaria, Reuters reported.

When Congress earlier this month passed a temporary budget to keep the government open, it essentially gave the executive branch the same amount of money as in last year’s budget.

Policy groups say the Trump administration has employed legally questionable methods to withhold money that Congress gave the executive branch to spend.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities said Trump’s effort to withhold the money was unlawful because doing so violates the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 — a law that Congress passed when then President Richard Nixon did the same thing.

The temporary budget gave the State Department $85 million for polio prevention abroad as part of a $1 billion package for maternal and child health.

Congress gave the HHS, which is now run by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., another $230 million to vaccinate children abroad. Of that amount, $180 million is for polio vaccinations. Another $293.2 million is for global public health protection, according to an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Pallansch and Rosenberg say all of these budgets could now be subject to cuts.

“The people who are making these cuts don’t know what they are cutting. That’s why this scary. We could lose the ability to react,” Rosenberg said.

Potential cuts to the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases — a domestic program to monitor diseases and viruses in all 50 states and territories — could be just as problematic.

“No one else has the capacity to collect information from all 50 states,” Rosenberg said. “Public health is funded by the government. It’s run by the government. There are no replacement parts for this.

“If you don’t have CDC doing this work, each state will have to set up its own system. It will essentially duplicate a system 50 times. It will be unaffordable and ineffective.”

Trump Administration Health Cuts announced Thursday:

— 3,500 full-time employees from the Food and Drug Administration, which is about 19% of its workforce.

— 2,400 employees from the CDC, about 18% of its workforce.

― 1,200 employees from the National Institutes of Health, about 6% of its workforce.

— 300 employees from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, about 4% of its workforce.