For some, the U.S. feels upside down lately. The unraveling of policies has organizations and the public waiting to see which way is up.
A crime no longer appears to be a crime when it comes to Jan. 6.
Refugees were met with compassion and humanitarianism by the U.S. less than a month ago. Now the organizations that help them financially have been cut off.
Public health employees who are in the business of finding solutions that lead to the healing and well-being of the public now fear for their own safety.
The American Accountability Foundation, a conservative political nonprofit, has listed 10 staff members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on a website called the “Diversity and Inclusion Watchlist.” Included are “dossiers” with photos, salaries and more.
The website states that a staffer’s 2021 Facebook post reading “Racism is a public health crisis” is “…Nothing but a distraction from the real, pressing health emergencies that the CDC should be focusing on.”
And per executive orders from President Donald Trump, several websites of the CDC and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services have been taken down.
The fear of safety is spreading across the CDC and other public health organizations, and staffers are placing projects on hold.
This week, a public health official at the Washington State Department of Public Health posted on LinkedIn that “federal staff who worked on health equity” should wipe or lock their profiles.
Their work, the official posted, “could result in violence against their family.”
The public health world as we’ve known it is upside down. The work of researchers related to race or equity is now ignored or denounced.
If we go by published research, a statement made last week by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could potentially jeopardize the health of Black people in need of medicine.
Last week, during confirmation hearings to become the new Health and Human Services Secretary, Kennedy told U.S. Sen. Angela Alsobrooks that Black people have stronger immune systems than White people and should receive vaccines in a different way than White people.
A strong immune system can protect a body from, say, death.
But simply looking at heart disease, the American Heart Association is aligned with public health officials in stating that Black people have a higher risk of cardiovascular disease.
“Black adults experience higher burden of [cardiovascular disease] risk factors such as hypertension and obesity and are more than twice as likely to die of [cardiovascular disease] relative to White adults,” a 2022 article states.
My own reporting, in 2022, for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, examined a CDC report that found disparity in socioeconomic factors played a role in the decrease in life expectancy for people of color from levels before the pandemic.
“It declined by nearly seven years for Native Americans from 2019 to 2021, and four years for Hispanics and African Americans during the same period.” This was compared to a drop in life expectancy of “two years in the Asian community and nearly two and a half years in the White community…”
For that story, Elizabeth Arias, a co-author of the CDC’s Vital Statistics Rapid Release report containing this information, told me that “overall declines in life expectancy are not surprising given COVID and the disparity in socioeconomic conditions for some groups of people. But the size of decreases were unexpected.”
In 2024, an AJC story cited a study by psychologists at Emory University and the University of Georgia that found racism leads to disease in Black communities.
Katherine Ehrlich of the University of Georgia described the findings as “Compelling.” She told the AJC, “Marginalized people in the Black community experience socioeconomic stress, discrimination, and microaggressions that damage their body and exert changes at the cellular level,” which leads to “cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes and even some cancers.”
But, it’s now 2025 and what could be relied upon as direction for better healing and well-being is being turned on its head.
Diversity. Equity. Inclusion. They are now considered bad words.
What was considered right is now wrong in a world where familiar truths seem to warp and dissolve into their opposites.
We are in scary times and must work within our communities to support eachother in order to survive this chaos.