Tom Frieden

The things that will improve health most we may never see.

Well, it's absolutely the case that one of the biggest risks here is that we are undermining our ability to see the health threats, threats to our lives, our livelihoods, our families.

Take one example from many.

apparently because of budget cuts and staffing cuts and the devastation of the CDC.

Public health is under assault right now, literal assault as a gunman opened fire and fired close to 500 rounds into the CDC campus, but also figuratively with massive budget cuts, thousands of staff laid off, half of the national centers closed.

And FoodNet, PulseNet, one of the things that tracks foodborne illnesses is going to stop tracking listeria and campylobacter.

These are two serious infections.

They're spread, by the way, by raw milk, among other things.

And, you know, if CDC isn't able, now we have government shutdown, if CDC isn't able to track things, you go to the supermarket and pick up whatever it is, a package of frozen peas or a TV dinner or something else.

It may have bacteria in it that make you sick.

So we are undermining our protections.

We are leaving ourselves blind to the microbial effects.

and toxic threats.

We're also turning back the clock on protections against PM2.5 that already kills 100,000 Americans every year, against mercury and arsenic and PFAS and other forever chemicals, which astonishingly, to me, contaminate half of the water in America.

And they've rolled back the protections there.

So what you have here is kind of those concentrated costs, those companies that don't want to do things that will benefit everyone, they're in control now.

And basically, it's open season on your lungs because they can pollute all they want into your lungs.

And this is the opposite of the prevention paradox.

It's kind of the harm paradox that basically you're allowing a few people

Self-interested industries to pollute, to contaminate, to sell toxic things, and the harms will be very widespread.