Dozens of HIV experts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention received e -mails on Wednesday withdrawal of notifications they received 10 weeks ago who deposited them. However, damage to their projects can be permanent, and continuous limitations on their research will damage lives, several HIV scientists from the CDC told KFF Health News about condition of anonymity due to fear of retribution.
The researchers were fired at the beginning of April, just before they finished in -depth, national surveys on HIV. Health officials throughout the country had interviewed tens of thousands of people who run the risk of gaining HIV, or who live with the virus, and information composed of mountains of medical records.
States and cities were willing to submit the information they had collected to the CDC in April, so that the statistics of the agency could prepare the quantities of data for analysis.
Health officials and policymakers use the data to design HIV programs that more efficiently curb and save lives. For example one 2023 Survey It revealed that about half of the adults under the age of 30 who lived with HIV were not in treatment steadily enough to keep them healthy and to prevent them from spreading the virus to others. Treatment percentages were much higher for people older than 50. As a result, health officials doubled over outreach to younger generations.
In April, however, national and local health officials were cut off from their CDC opposites after the dismissals. E -mails from the Ministry of Health and Human Services told staff that their roles “either unnecessary or almost identical to tasks that were performed elsewhere in the agency.”
Marti Merritt, a project coordinator at the Illinois State Health Department, was stunned that she and other state employees had invested in the surveys for more than a year to make them dark in the final phase. “It’s like the data went into a black hole,” she said. “How do you set priorities if you don’t have data?”
Merritt is worried that if the surveys do not resume, limited budgets will be wrong – and that cases will rise. Data can adjust health departments their efforts to the populations with the greatest risk of infection or disease progression.
Proof shows that the prevention of HIV is much cheaper than treating people as soon as they are infected. Preventing one HIV infection results in $ 466,000 in lifelong savings. Merritt was also relieved to have wasted the time from thousands of people who opened about intimate details of their lives in the hope of combating the HIV epidemic.
A doctor and HIV expert recovered on the CDC this week said that the late termination of the surveys would waste millions of taxpayers who have already been spent on collecting data. Two large, long-term efforts, the medical monitoring project and the national HIV behavioral monitoring system, cost around $ 72 million, he said.
“Two years of data from 30,000 participants will be unusable and will therefore be wasted,” if the projects cannot be completed, he said.
To resume the surveys, he and other CDC researchers would need a green light from higher up, because the subsidies that covered these surveys ended while they were on administrative leave in May.
The state’s health officials said they did not receive the CDC knowledge that the surveys usually extend in June. Merritt has conducted interviews for the medical monitoring project for about 20 years, she said, but the Illinois Health Department has now assigned her to other tasks. Have other health departments dismissed Or re -assigned employees to HIV surveillance.
If HHS allows the recovered researchers to resume the projects, they can try to explain the 10 -week gap in their analysis. But it would take time, postpone the next surveys round – if they start completely.
“These surveys are not lights that you switch on and off,” says John Brooks, a researcher who retired last year from the CDC’s Division of HIV prevention. If the surveys resume, he said, “We can get some value from all the money issued.”
However, the surveys would be further affected by actions related to the executive orders of Trump that are aimed at words such as “gender” that researchers use to learn who has HIV, that risk and why.
Experts from the CDC said they had to revise earlier surveys and again calculated the results in order not to refer to gender. This has led to changing data on two populations that are disproportionately affected by HIV: transgender people and men who have sex with men.
“To erase people from our data, harm them,” said the researcher and the doctor who has now been restored to the CDC. “I care about the transgender patients I see, and it is so painful to see them treating the government in this way.”
The doctor said he has treated HIV patients since the beginning of the epidemic in the 1980s, and the sting he now feels is worse than under President Ronald Reagan, who never called HIV publicly in his first term.
“There was a lack of financing,” he said, “but they don’t censor the science or try to control science as they do now.”
Many HIV researchers have adopted jobs outside the government or have moved since the dismissals in April. Some researchers who return to the agency mentioned the recovery perplex because the notifications do not say what they will do if they return and how long.
A short e -mail to CDC employees from Tom Nagy, Chief Human Capital Officer at the Department of Health and Human Services, assessed by KFF Health News, simply refers to the notification with regard to the reduction of strength and says: “That notification is withdrawn.”
In an e-mail reaction to questions, Andrew Nixon, HHS director Communication wrote,
“We have been paid all the time, even though we are not allowed to work, and that does not feel right if you are a dedicated official,” said a recovered employee.
We would like to speak with the current and former staff of the Ministry of Health and Human Services of his component agencies who believe that the public should understand the impact of what is happening within federal health bureaucracy. Send KFF Health News over signal on (415) 519-8778 or Contact us here.
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