George Luber is the former head of the climate and health program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Working at the CDC for the last 16 years, he is an expert on how climate affects populations’ health. The importance of his research for the CDC is immeasurable. In fact, the Trump administration, when downsizing our scientific research infrastructure, merged Luber’s climate change department with an asthma department and asked him to head the new frankensteins’s department—a department that conspicuously removed any mention of the word “climate” from the title.
However, Luber criticized the current administration’s moves, saying the merger would water down millions earmarked by Congress for climate change research. According to Luber, this got him unofficially demoted to working at home. After Luber’s criticisms appeared, the CDC began filing grievances against Luber, saying that he had written a book in 2013 without proper “authorization,” and had “renew ethics clearance paperwork five years earlier.” Considering how many ethics clearance issues are sitting and have sat in our current administration, the latter charge is something more than surreal.
Luber, with the help of the group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), are filing a grievance on the climate scientist’s behalf, telling Reuters that “As our climate spins out of control, bureaucrats eager to please the Trump administration have worked feverishly to destroy the reputations of climate scientists who stand in its way.”
Luber’s former department, the Climate and Health Program was begun in 2009 with the directive to “help states and local health agencies respond to the public health impacts of climate change.” Research and advise concerning a changing climate’s impacts on the infrastructure and resources in various localities seems like a very important bit of work.According to Science Magazine, Luber, while retaining his title, works 5 days a week from home and has an armed escort any time he shows up at his old office. PEER staff counsel explkains that the Trump administration has effectively gagged Luber from sharing his important work with the public.
We all know that the Trump administration, like any current Republican iteration of an administration, are so terrified of facing their responsibilities to their fellow human beings that they will ban even the mention of scientific phrases concerning any hot button conservative issues like climate change or women’s health.