Trump to CDC: shut up.

To accomplish its mission of increasing the health security of the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states that it “conducts critical science and provides health information” to protect the nation. But since President Trump’s administration assumed power in January, many of the platforms the CDC used to communicate with the public have gone silent, an NPR analysis found.

Many of the CDC’s newsletters have stopped being distributed, workers at the CDC say. Health alerts about disease outbreaks, previously sent to health professionals subscribed to the CDC’s Health Alert Network, haven’t been dispatched since March. The agency’s main social media channels have come under new ownership of the Department of Health and Human Services, emails reviewed by NPR show, and most have gone more than a month without posting their own new content.

Interesting. What’s the thinking here? The usual Trump-Musk substitute for thinking? “Government is bad, close it all down”? Is that it?

Health emergencies have not paused since January. Cases of measles, salmonella, listeria and hepatitis A and C have spread throughout the country. More than 100 million Americans continue to suffer from chronic diseases like diabetes and breast cancer. The decline in the agency’s communication could put people at risk, said four current and former CDC workers, three of whom NPR is allowing to remain anonymous because they are still employed by the CDC and believe they may be punished for speaking out.

But being put at risk is good for people. It toughens them up, makes them hardier, teaches them lessons about life. Besides, communication costs money. That’s money that could be in Trump’s pocket instead.

“Social media is one of the main ways the CDC communicates plain language, life-saving messages to America,” said one CDC employee.

But now, many of those messages have stopped being sent out. Changes to communication at the CDC began shortly after Trump was inaugurated in January, when HHS instructed the CDC and other health agencies to pause any sort of collaboration with people outside the agency.

“So at that point we stopped pretty much all communications,” said a CDC employee who works at the agency.

It’s efficiency. The less communication there is, the more efficiently things run. Everyone gets to go home early.

Two CDC employees who work in communications told NPR that fewer than half of the public health posts they’ve sent to HHS for approval have been cleared for publication on social media. Even posts that include basic information about recent disease outbreaks, like the number of people sickened or hospitalized, have not been posted as requested by employees, NPR confirmed after reviewing posts submitted for approval by an employee. Communications workers say they are also suggesting fewer health posts because they anticipate that their posts will be rejected.

“Everything is getting bottlenecked at the top,” said a worker. “It is extraordinarily time-consuming and backlogs us by weeks, if not months.”

The consequences could be deadly, experts said.

“When you have an outbreak of something like listeria, if you are a person who is pregnant and you consume food items that might have listeria in it that CDC should be warning you about, you run the risk of the baby that you are carrying dying,” said Guest. “And so that information needs to get out there.”

Oh well done, NPR, do be sure to distract us from this quite important disaster to make a big show of your enlightened refusal to say “pregnant woman.” We’re all massively impressed, and we no longer care about the Trump administrations war on medical information. Good luck in the future, Person Who Is Pregnant!