Dozens of HIV experts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were emailed on Wednesday, June 11 and withdrew the dismissal notice 10 weeks ago.
However, the damage of the project can be permanent, and CDC scientists from HIV to KFF Health News said that continuous restrictions on research will harm life. They did it anonymously because of fear of retaliation.
The researchers were fired on the verge of completing a thorough national investigation of HIV in early April. Health officers from all over the country interviewed tens of thousands of people at risk of living with HIV or viruses and collected information from the medical records.
The state and cities were ready to send the information collected in April to the CDC, allowing institutional statistics experts to prepare the information of the data for analysis.
Health staff and legislators use these data to prevent infections and design programs for HIVs that seek life more efficiently.
for example, 2023 Survey He said that about half of the adults under 30 years of age who lived with HIV were not treated so that they regularly maintained their health and delivered the virus to others. For people aged 50 and older, the treatment rate was much higher. As a result, health authorities have destroyed their efforts to reach the younger generation.
However, in April, after dismissal, the relevance of the state and local health authorities and CDCs decreased. Electronic KOREROS of HHS (Health and Human Services Department) pointed out that his functionality was “the same as those who served other areas of unnecessary or substantially in other areas of the agency.”
Marti Merritt, a project coordinator for the Illinois Health Bureau, has been stunned by her and other staff investigated for more than a year and disappears at the final stage. “This is as if the data went to the black hole,” he said. “How is the priority set without data?”
Merritt is concerned that if the survey is not resumed, the limited budget is evaluated and the case increases. Data allows the health department to apply efforts to the population with the highest risk of disease infection.
Evidence shows that preventing HIV is much cheaper than treating infected people.
Prevent single HIV infection Saving $ 466,000 in a lifetime. Merritt was also disappointed that he sincerely waste thousands of people for his intimate details of his life to fight HIV epidemics.
HIV doctors and experts who were restored to CDC on June 9 would be a waste of millions of dollars that they had already spent on data collection after the survey. He said that the costs of two large -scale initiatives, medical monitoring projects and national HIV behavioral monitoring systems are about $ 72 million.
“If you can’t finish the project, the 30,000 participants’ data for two years will not be used and will be wasteful.
In order to resume the survey, other CDC researchers need the green light of the largest authorities because the subsidies included in this survey have been completed during the administrative decrease in May.
The state health authorities argued that the investigation was generally not a notification of a CDC that was renewed in June. Merritt has interviewed the medical monitoring project for about 20 years, but the Illinois Health Bureau has assigned it to other tasks. Other health departments They were fired Or ashes for HIV surveillance staff.
If a researcher who has recovered from HHS can resume the project, you can try to reward for 10 weeks in analysis. But this takes time, which will be more delayed when the next survey begins.
John Brooks, a retired researcher from CDC’s HIV prevention department last year, said, “This survey is not turned on and off.” When the survey resumes, “we can get the value of all the money spent.”
However, the survey will be harmed by the actions related to Trump’s administrative order, which focuses on words such as “gender”.
CDC experts have already confirmed that the results should be reviewed so that they do not mention the previous survey and not mention the gender. This included changing the data of the two populations that were imbalanced by HIV.
Researchers and doctors said, “I am hardered by deleting people from our data.” I’m worried about the transgender patients I attended, and it’s very painful to see the government treats them in this way. “
The doctor has treated HIV patients since the beginning of the epidemic in the 1980s, and the pain I feel now feels better than Ronald Reagan’s president, who has never mentioned HIV publicly during his first term.
“There was a lack of financing, but I did not try to censor science or to control it as it is now,” he said.
Since the layoffs in April, many HIV researchers have accepted or moved outside the government. Some people who will return to the agency have defined the court as a proud. Because notifications do not specify what they will do for a long time.
A simple e -mail for CDC employees of KFF Health News, TOM NAGY, is simply a presentation of the decrease in personnel, and “the notice has been canceled.”
Andrew Nixon, director of HHS Communication, wrote: “HHS optimizes the operation without compromising the required work. All Americans’ health and well improvement are our top priority.”
“We are prosecuting this time even though we have not allowed work, and it is not pleasant to a dedicated official,” said the staff said.
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