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To the Editor:
As former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention public health professionals, we are alarmed by the Trump administration’s recent actions, which severely restrict the agency’s communications and have compromised its ability to protect the health of the American people.
Late last month, the C.D.C. was ordered to cease communications with the World Health Organization and other agencies to comply with an executive order from President Trump. The C.D.C. and the W.H.O. have worked closely together since they were created in the 1940s to improve the health of Americans and save lives.
That work has included eliminating smallpox, nearly eliminating polio, stopping the first SARS epidemic, containing Ebola, mitigating the Covid-19 pandemic and protecting people from bird flu — to name only a few accomplishments. But now, for example, the C.D.C. will not have input into the W.H.O.’s meeting deciding which influenza strains should be targeted by next year’s flu shot.
Domestically, C.D.C. employees are now severely restricted from communicating with anyone outside the government and from publishing anything that includes words like “gender, L.G.B.T.Q., biologically male and biologically female,” and have been ordered to retract and revise existing publications using those words.
Certain C.D.C. websites with medical recommendations for practitioners and health officials have gone dark. Witness the C.D.C.’s recent posting and immediate deleting of data about bird flu spread from cats to people (news article, Feb. 8).
Many people are not aware of the work the C.D.C. does because it focuses on prevention, and it usually works: We don’t see diseases and injuries that did not occur as a result of those interventions.
From tracking disease and containing outbreaks, to promoting evidence-based disease prevention programs, to cutting-edge research and laboratory testing available nowhere else, the C.D.C. works tirelessly to protect and promote the health of America’s people.
The administration’s muzzling of the C.D.C. endangers Americans.
Peter Cegielski
Barbara Marston
Atlanta
The letter was also signed by 36 other former C.D.C. health professionals.
The New Chairman of the Kennedy Center
To the Editor:
Re “Trump Made Chair of Kennedy Center as Its President Is Fired” (news article, Feb. 12):
Of all of the many horrifying announcements coming from the new administration, the news that President Trump was made chairman of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington has somehow felt especially rattling.
It is evidence that there is no meaningful resistance to this grab for power and that there is no limit to Mr. Trump’s reach. The act feels like a perversion worthy of George Orwell’s “1984.”
This person with no sensitivity to the value of artistic expression will usurp the very pinnacle of performing arts and fashion it in his own image.
We are all on notice.
Mimi Blasiak
North Potomac, Md.
To the Editor:
This administration is all about revenge and retribution. What President Trump is doing to the Kennedy Center is an act of revenge and retribution, pure and simple, toward all the artists who have rightly spurned him. My heart goes out to Kennedy Center employees and their families.
Pamela A. Okano
Seattle
Really, Mayor Adams?
To the Editor:
Re “Adams Professes His Innocence and Pledges to Regain Trust of New Yorkers” (news article, Feb. 12):
So let me see if I have this straight. Mayor Eric Adams, after getting all cozy with Donald Trump, whose Justice Department then ordered the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan to dismiss the corruption charges against Mr. Adams, now hopes to regain our trust.
Well, Mr. Mayor, as a longtime New York City resident and a lifelong Democrat who voted for you, all I can say now is “Fuggedaboutit!” — followed by a very loud Bronx cheer.
Mary-Ellen Banashek
New York
Profiles in Cowardice
To the Editor:
Re “Trump Elbows Past Congress; G.O.P. Shrugs” (Congressional Memo, front page, Jan. 31):
We have seen the new administration attempt to circumvent the Constitution, enact hasty executive orders that disrupt services for our most vulnerable citizens, promote intentionally cruel policies and nominate clearly unqualified candidates for powerful and sensitive posts.
None of this would be possible without the support of the slim Republican majorities in the Senate and the House of Representatives as well as the biased members of the Supreme Court. The administration is simply looking to see what it can get away with, which is quite a lot, with the fear and groveling of all of these people.
I understand that many of these folks think that they are doing the right thing. I also know that some of them are simply caving in for political cover.
It would be great if the self-proclaimed patriotic traditional conservatives showed some political courage like that demonstrated by the eight senators highlighted in John F. Kennedy’s book “Profiles in Courage.” What we are witnessing right now is more like “Profiles in Cowardice.”
Gregory Reiser
Brooklyn
Fury Over Gaza
To the Editor:
Re “Still an Imperative: End Hamas’s Control of Gaza,” by Bret Stephens (column, Feb. 12):
As an Iranian American, born in Iran, I still remember the terrifying sight and sound of bombs being dropped from the sky by U.S.-backed Iraqi forces when I was just a child. Those memories of air-raid sirens and antiaircraft gunfire are etched into my mind.
Reading Mr. Stephens’s column brought those images from the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s rushing back and filled me with fury. I am struck once again by the audacity of those who would impose their will on the most vulnerable, treating entire peoples as pawns on a chessboard of power.
As a proud American, I am both saddened and enraged by the ease with which Mr. Stephens discusses displacement and dispossession of an entire population — as if driving people from their homeland is simply a matter of policy, not a profound human tragedy. It makes me wonder how many future Americans today are among the Gazans Mr. Stephens would see uprooted, forced to scatter like leaves in the wind.
War is easy to justify when it is waged from a distance, when the suffering belongs to someone else. From where I stand, the echoes of the past are deafening.
Parsa Shams
Seattle
‘Please Organize Us!’
To the Editor:
Someone please organize us! We need to know whom to boycott or buy from, and when and where to march. I’m 84, but I will get on a bus to Washington and march.
We are here and more terrified than ever, but we’re through mourning.
Peggy Sherertz
New York
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