The Republican Party is no friend of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). They’ve been trying to gut the CDC for a while now, creating a steady starvation diet of the agency’s budget for years. This coming February, Atlanta was set to house a major climate change summit concerning the health effects that our rapidly changing climate poses. That has been abruptly put on hold.
The Climate and Health Summit was scheduled to be held in Atlanta, where the CDC is headquartered, in February. Agency leaders did not directly address why the summit was canceled and instead forwarded an email sent to participants indicating it may be rescheduled.
"We are currently exploring options so that the Summit may take place later in the year," CDC officials wrote.
Some believe that with an adversarial legislature and an orange president whose “advisor” is a man who wants to see the world burn down, the CDC is trying to lower its science profile.
The former officials also pointed out that the CDC has a history of avoiding politicized issues, such as gun violence research and reproductive health.
A formerly scheduled speaker for the conference, Edward Maibach, director of the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University, told the Washington Post in an email that he feared the agency was self-censoring out of fear that the new Administration would cut their funding or retaliate. Maibach said the agency should instead hold firm on the side of established science and not create a precedent of bowing to political pressure.
Here’s Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association.
"They had no idea or not whether the new administration would be supportive," said Benjamin, whose group was a co-sponsor of the event with the CDC.
Rather, the decision was "a strategic retreat," intended to head off a possible last minute cancellation or other repercussions from Trump officials who may prove hostile to spending money on climate change science, Benjamin said Monday.
The sad part of all of this is that, as of today, the Republican non-science based position on climate change is that it is happening but whether or not humans have a meaningful effect on its progress is up in the air. This bullshit opinion would still preclude Republicans from logically being against a health organization looking into discussing the potential for serious global health issues that would arise from the changing climate. And yes, I know I said “logically”!