Public is at risk without CDC data reports
There is nothing efficient about stopping communications from public health agencies. It is inefficient, and it puts our lives at risk.
This was the first week that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did not publish its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the most widely read public health journal in the world. This is alarming. Our government is shutting down historically open pathways of information sharing, leaving everyone in the dark about our own health. We are now unable to access scientific data about current and emerging health threats.
Kansas has a large tuberculosis outbreak. We are in the middle of flu season with bird influenza spreading in cattle and birds in our country, affecting food prices and threatening humans. Tanzania and Rwanda, countries that are a plane flight away, are seeing an outbreak of Marburg disease.
A nonpartisan, science-based agency tasked with guarding our public health has been silenced. We should ask our elected representatives if our lives matter to them at all.
JENNIFER LOWANCE, ATLANTA
Racism definitely not a thing of the past
Jack Bernard’s Jan. 24 AJC essay decrying the “misguided, willfully ignorant push from MAGA to declare bigotry a thing of the past” was surprising. He is a Republican, but he is willing to speak up against President Donald Trump. That takes extraordinary bravery from a Republican these days, so good for him.
I’m a boomer. The post-World War II GI benefits allowed my father to be the first person in his family to graduate from college, go to medical school, buy a house and build our family wealth from nothing. It wasn’t all that long ago that I learned these benefits were, practically speaking, not available to Black veterans. I loved my father very much, but he was not a one-in-a-million person. If he had been Black he would have been working class, and we could never have bought a house in that fast-growing Minneapolis suburb and watched the value skyrocket.
The racism those Black veterans and, by extension, their children experienced is deeply embedded in our society today. It is most definitely not a thing of the past.
PAM WOODLEY, ATLANTA
Rep. Collins’ comments were unacceptable
Rep. Mike Collins said Bishop Mariann Budde should be “added to the deportation list” in reaction to her plea for mercy for many Americans who will be affected by President Donald Trump’s draconian orders on immigration.
This Georgia congressman apparently does not know that an American-born citizen cannot be deported for saying what she thinks. This is protected free speech. I remember Trump and the MAGA crowd thought an attack on the Capitol was “free speech.” Apparently, a plea for mercy at an interfaith service was unacceptable to Trump. Collins’ comment was unworthy of an elected official.
KARLA PEABODY, CUMMING
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