President Trump has signed many executive orders. Besides immediately halting funding to repair roads, bridges and ports, something we can all see, other actions are less visible. They may only attract our attention once something bad happens.
For example, Trump has ordered the Department of Health and Human Services—including the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—to stop all external communications. No health advisories, no scientific reports, no website
updates, no social media posts.
These agencies that safeguard our food and drug supply, alert healthcare providers to disease outbreaks, and conduct life-saving research are now silenced.
Journalists Lena Sun and Dan Diamond (Washington Post) reported that the CDC was about to publish new reports on the avian influenza virus, and had recently urged hospitals to test flu patients for it. Bird flu has crossed over from poultry to dairy farms, to wild and domestic mammals. It has killed a man in Louisiana and severely sickened a Canadian girl. ABC News reported the slaughtering of millions of birds at U.S. poultry farms, driving up egg prices. Bird flu has shut down Georgia’s grower-to-grower poultry sales. A multi-generation duck farm in New York state, operating since the 1640s, lost all 100,000 birds. According to Lancaster Farming (https://www.lancasterfarming.com), an egg farm with 50,000 birds in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley tested positive on January 26 for avian influenza. Clearly, there is a growing threat to birds and humans.
Our public servants must be able to work for the citizens of the U.S. Any new administration may change how government departments operate, but it makes no sense to abruptly halt communications, leaving other experts and the public in the dark.
Carol Coldren
1/27/25