
Dr. Amy Liepert talks to Hector Almeida Gil, who fell from the border wall separating the United States and Mexico, as he recovers at UC San Diego Medical Center on April 28, 2022. (Photo: Eric Thayer for The Washington Post via Getty Images)
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Dr. Amy Liepert talks to Hector Almeida Gil, who fell from the border wall separating the United States and Mexico, as he recovers at UC San Diego Medical Center on April 28, 2022. (Photo: Eric Thayer for The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Doctors in Southern California are connecting former President Donald Trump's efforts to build a U.S.-Mexico border wall that "can't be climbed" with soaring rates of serious injuries and deaths among migrants.
"We had come to save our lives, not to risk them in such an awful way."
Seven physicians at the University of California, San Diego detailed new statistics and their observations about local trauma cases in a research letter published Friday in the journal JAMA Surgery.
Under Trump, a 30-foot wall was installed across more than 400 miles, often replacing shorter barriers. The doctors focused on admissions to their trauma center after the new wall went up in California's Imperial and San Diego Counties.
Before the higher barrier was built, "there were 67 fall admissions from the border wall compared with 375 during the after period," the letter states, explaining that "this increase of more than five times is still significant" when the doctors factor in average apprehensions by U.S. immigration officials.
After the wall was raised, there was also a jump in deaths--from zero to 16.
\u201cIn @JAMASurgery - The 30 foot US \u2013 Mexico border wall was associated with 16 deaths and 5X increase in injuries In San Diego and Imperial Counties after completion in 2019. These patients were treated at trauma centers with the pandemic. doi:10.1001/jamasurg.2022.1885\u201d— UCSD Trauma Burn (@UCSD Trauma Burn) 1651245584
"Once you go over 20 feet, and up to 30 feet, the chance of severe injury and death are higher," Dr. Jay Doucet, chief of the trauma division at UC San Diego Health, told The Washington Post. "We're seeing injuries we didn't see before: pelvic fractures, spinal cord injuries, brain injuries, and a lot of open fractures when the bone comes through the skin."
As the newspaper reported:
At Scripps Mercy Hospital, the other major trauma center for the San Diego area, border wall fall victims accounted for 16% of the 230 patients treated last month, a higher share than gunshot and stabbing cases, according to Vishal Bansal, the director of trauma.
"I've never seen anything like this," Bansal said in an interview. "This is crazy." His trauma ward treated 139 border wall patients injured by falls last year, up from 41 in 2020.
Hector Almeida, a 33-year-old dentist from Cuba who was sent to UC San Diego Health after fracturing his left leg Monday, told the Post that "I never expected we would have to climb the wall."
According to the paper, "Smugglers led his group to the wall with a ladder and told them to climb up and slide down the other side, said Almeida, who said he saw one woman fall and break both legs, and an older man with a severe head injury."
The San Diego Union-Tribune shared what happened to a Mexican family trying to flee drug cartel violence after they were turned away by U.S. officials under the Title 42 policy while seeking asylum at the San Ysidro Port of Entry:
On a foggy night in mid-March, several family members from the Mexican state of Michoacan followed smugglers' instructions to climb the first of two border barriers to reach U.S. soil near San Diego.
One of the women felt her grip slipping on the first fence from the moisture in the air as she struggled over. When she approached the second wall, looming 30 feet above her, she realized it would be impossible for her to get over safely. As she panicked, the smugglers told her to wait to the side for Border Patrol to get her so that other migrants could cross.
It was only after she reached the Border Patrol station that she learned that her 14-year-old daughter, whom the smugglers sent with an earlier group, had fallen from the 30-foot wall.
"It was the worst night of my life," said the woman, whose daughter remains mostly bedridden after spending a week in the hospital with a fractured skull, neck, and back. "We had come to save our lives, not to risk them in such an awful way."
Along with the human impact, the rise in falls has taken a financial toll. The letter notes that "the increased hospital costs of the surge in admissions exceeded $13 million in 2021 dollars."
The surge also coincided with the Covid-19 pandemic, which has strained the U.S. healthcare system, the paper points out, adding:
The care of these injured immigrants is not only a humanitarian problem but also a public health crisis that further worsened trauma center bed capacity, staff shortages, and professionals' moral injury. Most of these patients had significant brain and facial injuries or complex fractures of the extremities or spine, with many requiring intensive care and staged operative reconstructions. Lack of health insurance made most patients ineligible for rehabilitation facilities or post-discharge physical therapy, further lengthening prolonged hospital stays.
"This isn't a fracture you get when you fall off your bike, and you get a cast on it," Dr. Amy Liepert, medical director of acute care surgery at UC San Diego Medical, told the Union-Tribune. "These are bones broken in multiple pieces that need to be pinned back together, sometimes with external fixation devices."
The letter says that the Title 42 policy enabling U.S. officials to swiftly expel many migrants like the family from Michoacan "may have increased the numbers and desperation of persons crossing the border away from ports of entry and increased the number of falls."
The Title 42 policy was implemented under Trump and continued under Biden, who plans to end it next month--though some lawmakers are pushing to extend it with a bill that critics say "ignores individuals and families in desperate need of safety and their right to seek protection from persecution."
Related Content
The doctors' paper asserts that "future border barrier policy decisions should include assessment of the impact of increased injuries on the local healthcare systems as well as humanitarian consequences."
As for the existing segments of the wall raised under Trump, Jules Kramer of the Minority Humanitarian Foundation, a San Diego nonprofit that has cared for injured migrants, told the Post that "it's absolutely tragic, and it's not deterring anyone--it's only harming people."
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Doctors in Southern California are connecting former President Donald Trump's efforts to build a U.S.-Mexico border wall that "can't be climbed" with soaring rates of serious injuries and deaths among migrants.
"We had come to save our lives, not to risk them in such an awful way."
Seven physicians at the University of California, San Diego detailed new statistics and their observations about local trauma cases in a research letter published Friday in the journal JAMA Surgery.
Under Trump, a 30-foot wall was installed across more than 400 miles, often replacing shorter barriers. The doctors focused on admissions to their trauma center after the new wall went up in California's Imperial and San Diego Counties.
Before the higher barrier was built, "there were 67 fall admissions from the border wall compared with 375 during the after period," the letter states, explaining that "this increase of more than five times is still significant" when the doctors factor in average apprehensions by U.S. immigration officials.
After the wall was raised, there was also a jump in deaths--from zero to 16.
\u201cIn @JAMASurgery - The 30 foot US \u2013 Mexico border wall was associated with 16 deaths and 5X increase in injuries In San Diego and Imperial Counties after completion in 2019. These patients were treated at trauma centers with the pandemic. doi:10.1001/jamasurg.2022.1885\u201d— UCSD Trauma Burn (@UCSD Trauma Burn) 1651245584
"Once you go over 20 feet, and up to 30 feet, the chance of severe injury and death are higher," Dr. Jay Doucet, chief of the trauma division at UC San Diego Health, told The Washington Post. "We're seeing injuries we didn't see before: pelvic fractures, spinal cord injuries, brain injuries, and a lot of open fractures when the bone comes through the skin."
As the newspaper reported:
At Scripps Mercy Hospital, the other major trauma center for the San Diego area, border wall fall victims accounted for 16% of the 230 patients treated last month, a higher share than gunshot and stabbing cases, according to Vishal Bansal, the director of trauma.
"I've never seen anything like this," Bansal said in an interview. "This is crazy." His trauma ward treated 139 border wall patients injured by falls last year, up from 41 in 2020.
Hector Almeida, a 33-year-old dentist from Cuba who was sent to UC San Diego Health after fracturing his left leg Monday, told the Post that "I never expected we would have to climb the wall."
According to the paper, "Smugglers led his group to the wall with a ladder and told them to climb up and slide down the other side, said Almeida, who said he saw one woman fall and break both legs, and an older man with a severe head injury."
The San Diego Union-Tribune shared what happened to a Mexican family trying to flee drug cartel violence after they were turned away by U.S. officials under the Title 42 policy while seeking asylum at the San Ysidro Port of Entry:
On a foggy night in mid-March, several family members from the Mexican state of Michoacan followed smugglers' instructions to climb the first of two border barriers to reach U.S. soil near San Diego.
One of the women felt her grip slipping on the first fence from the moisture in the air as she struggled over. When she approached the second wall, looming 30 feet above her, she realized it would be impossible for her to get over safely. As she panicked, the smugglers told her to wait to the side for Border Patrol to get her so that other migrants could cross.
It was only after she reached the Border Patrol station that she learned that her 14-year-old daughter, whom the smugglers sent with an earlier group, had fallen from the 30-foot wall.
"It was the worst night of my life," said the woman, whose daughter remains mostly bedridden after spending a week in the hospital with a fractured skull, neck, and back. "We had come to save our lives, not to risk them in such an awful way."
Along with the human impact, the rise in falls has taken a financial toll. The letter notes that "the increased hospital costs of the surge in admissions exceeded $13 million in 2021 dollars."
The surge also coincided with the Covid-19 pandemic, which has strained the U.S. healthcare system, the paper points out, adding:
The care of these injured immigrants is not only a humanitarian problem but also a public health crisis that further worsened trauma center bed capacity, staff shortages, and professionals' moral injury. Most of these patients had significant brain and facial injuries or complex fractures of the extremities or spine, with many requiring intensive care and staged operative reconstructions. Lack of health insurance made most patients ineligible for rehabilitation facilities or post-discharge physical therapy, further lengthening prolonged hospital stays.
"This isn't a fracture you get when you fall off your bike, and you get a cast on it," Dr. Amy Liepert, medical director of acute care surgery at UC San Diego Medical, told the Union-Tribune. "These are bones broken in multiple pieces that need to be pinned back together, sometimes with external fixation devices."
The letter says that the Title 42 policy enabling U.S. officials to swiftly expel many migrants like the family from Michoacan "may have increased the numbers and desperation of persons crossing the border away from ports of entry and increased the number of falls."
The Title 42 policy was implemented under Trump and continued under Biden, who plans to end it next month--though some lawmakers are pushing to extend it with a bill that critics say "ignores individuals and families in desperate need of safety and their right to seek protection from persecution."
Related Content
The doctors' paper asserts that "future border barrier policy decisions should include assessment of the impact of increased injuries on the local healthcare systems as well as humanitarian consequences."
As for the existing segments of the wall raised under Trump, Jules Kramer of the Minority Humanitarian Foundation, a San Diego nonprofit that has cared for injured migrants, told the Post that "it's absolutely tragic, and it's not deterring anyone--it's only harming people."
Doctors in Southern California are connecting former President Donald Trump's efforts to build a U.S.-Mexico border wall that "can't be climbed" with soaring rates of serious injuries and deaths among migrants.
"We had come to save our lives, not to risk them in such an awful way."
Seven physicians at the University of California, San Diego detailed new statistics and their observations about local trauma cases in a research letter published Friday in the journal JAMA Surgery.
Under Trump, a 30-foot wall was installed across more than 400 miles, often replacing shorter barriers. The doctors focused on admissions to their trauma center after the new wall went up in California's Imperial and San Diego Counties.
Before the higher barrier was built, "there were 67 fall admissions from the border wall compared with 375 during the after period," the letter states, explaining that "this increase of more than five times is still significant" when the doctors factor in average apprehensions by U.S. immigration officials.
After the wall was raised, there was also a jump in deaths--from zero to 16.
\u201cIn @JAMASurgery - The 30 foot US \u2013 Mexico border wall was associated with 16 deaths and 5X increase in injuries In San Diego and Imperial Counties after completion in 2019. These patients were treated at trauma centers with the pandemic. doi:10.1001/jamasurg.2022.1885\u201d— UCSD Trauma Burn (@UCSD Trauma Burn) 1651245584
"Once you go over 20 feet, and up to 30 feet, the chance of severe injury and death are higher," Dr. Jay Doucet, chief of the trauma division at UC San Diego Health, told The Washington Post. "We're seeing injuries we didn't see before: pelvic fractures, spinal cord injuries, brain injuries, and a lot of open fractures when the bone comes through the skin."
As the newspaper reported:
At Scripps Mercy Hospital, the other major trauma center for the San Diego area, border wall fall victims accounted for 16% of the 230 patients treated last month, a higher share than gunshot and stabbing cases, according to Vishal Bansal, the director of trauma.
"I've never seen anything like this," Bansal said in an interview. "This is crazy." His trauma ward treated 139 border wall patients injured by falls last year, up from 41 in 2020.
Hector Almeida, a 33-year-old dentist from Cuba who was sent to UC San Diego Health after fracturing his left leg Monday, told the Post that "I never expected we would have to climb the wall."
According to the paper, "Smugglers led his group to the wall with a ladder and told them to climb up and slide down the other side, said Almeida, who said he saw one woman fall and break both legs, and an older man with a severe head injury."
The San Diego Union-Tribune shared what happened to a Mexican family trying to flee drug cartel violence after they were turned away by U.S. officials under the Title 42 policy while seeking asylum at the San Ysidro Port of Entry:
On a foggy night in mid-March, several family members from the Mexican state of Michoacan followed smugglers' instructions to climb the first of two border barriers to reach U.S. soil near San Diego.
One of the women felt her grip slipping on the first fence from the moisture in the air as she struggled over. When she approached the second wall, looming 30 feet above her, she realized it would be impossible for her to get over safely. As she panicked, the smugglers told her to wait to the side for Border Patrol to get her so that other migrants could cross.
It was only after she reached the Border Patrol station that she learned that her 14-year-old daughter, whom the smugglers sent with an earlier group, had fallen from the 30-foot wall.
"It was the worst night of my life," said the woman, whose daughter remains mostly bedridden after spending a week in the hospital with a fractured skull, neck, and back. "We had come to save our lives, not to risk them in such an awful way."
Along with the human impact, the rise in falls has taken a financial toll. The letter notes that "the increased hospital costs of the surge in admissions exceeded $13 million in 2021 dollars."
The surge also coincided with the Covid-19 pandemic, which has strained the U.S. healthcare system, the paper points out, adding:
The care of these injured immigrants is not only a humanitarian problem but also a public health crisis that further worsened trauma center bed capacity, staff shortages, and professionals' moral injury. Most of these patients had significant brain and facial injuries or complex fractures of the extremities or spine, with many requiring intensive care and staged operative reconstructions. Lack of health insurance made most patients ineligible for rehabilitation facilities or post-discharge physical therapy, further lengthening prolonged hospital stays.
"This isn't a fracture you get when you fall off your bike, and you get a cast on it," Dr. Amy Liepert, medical director of acute care surgery at UC San Diego Medical, told the Union-Tribune. "These are bones broken in multiple pieces that need to be pinned back together, sometimes with external fixation devices."
The letter says that the Title 42 policy enabling U.S. officials to swiftly expel many migrants like the family from Michoacan "may have increased the numbers and desperation of persons crossing the border away from ports of entry and increased the number of falls."
The Title 42 policy was implemented under Trump and continued under Biden, who plans to end it next month--though some lawmakers are pushing to extend it with a bill that critics say "ignores individuals and families in desperate need of safety and their right to seek protection from persecution."
Related Content
The doctors' paper asserts that "future border barrier policy decisions should include assessment of the impact of increased injuries on the local healthcare systems as well as humanitarian consequences."
As for the existing segments of the wall raised under Trump, Jules Kramer of the Minority Humanitarian Foundation, a San Diego nonprofit that has cared for injured migrants, told the Post that "it's absolutely tragic, and it's not deterring anyone--it's only harming people."
"Workers are fighting for a society where public schools take precedence over private profits, healthcare is prioritized over hedge funds, and affordable housing is valued more than homelessness," said May Day Strong.
This is a developing story... Please check back for possible updates.
Americans turned out across the United States on Monday for more than 1,000 demonstrations against President Donald Trump and other oligarchs "to reclaim worker power against billionaires who hoard unprecedented wealth and power."
The "Workers Over Billionaires" protests, led by the May Day Strong Coalition, which is made up of dozens of organizations including the AFL-CIO, American Federation of Teachers, National Union of Healthcare Workers, and advocacy groups like Americans for Tax Fairness, Indivisible, Our Revolution, and Public Citizen.
Demonstrations took place or are set to happen in big cities, small towns, and communities in between all across the nation. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) spoke at a rally in Concord, New Hampshire, where he vowed that "together, we will create an economy and government that work for all, not just the 1%."
May Day Strong said Monday's mobilizations aim "to build collective action against billionaires taking over the US government."
"Building upon momentum from May Day, Good Trouble Lives On, No Kings, and key impromptu actions in the streets and the workplace, Workers Over Billionaires will reach communities nationwide, tapping rural and city workers to stop the billionaire agenda that continues to burden everyone," the coalition said. "As the federal government continues to enable the ultrarich, working people are stepping onto pavement to stop their greed and protect their families."
"Working families want to live in a country that puts workers over billionaires," the coalition added. "Workers are fighting for a society where public schools take precedence over private profits, healthcare is prioritized over hedge funds, and affordable housing is valued more than homelessness."
AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler said ahead of the protests: "Every single thing working people have won for ourselves in this country's history—it's not because we asked those in power. It's not because they were handed to us. It's because we fought for them relentlessly."
Saqib Bhatti, executive director of Action Center on Race and the Economy (ACRE), told USA Today that "it's important to show that there is opposition to the Trump-billionaire agenda in every community, big and small; it's not just cities that are united against what's happening... it's all towns, it's small towns that voted overwhelmingly for Trump."
Under the proposal, the US would take control after "voluntary" relocation of Palestinians from the strip, where proposed projects include an Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone and Gaza Trump Riviera & Islands.
The White House is "circulating" a plan to transform a substantially depopulated Gaza into US President Donald Trump's vision of a high-tech "Riviera of the Middle East" brimming with private investment and replete with artificial intelligence-powered "smart cities."
That's according a 38-page prospectus for a proposed Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration, and Transformation (GREAT) Trust obtained by The Washington Post and published in a report on Sunday. Parts of the proposal were previously reported by the Financial Times.
"Gaza can transform into a Mediterranean hub for manufacturing, trade, data, and tourism, benefiting from its strategic location, access to markets... resources, and a young workforce all supported by Israeli tech and [Gulf Cooperation Council] investments," the prospectus states.
However, to journalist Hala Jaber, the plan amounts to "genocide packaged as real estate."
Here comes the Gaza Network State.A plan to turn Gaza into a privately-developed “gleaming tourism resort and high-tech manufacturing and technology hub” with “AI-powered smart cities” and “Trump Riviera” resortgift link:wapo.st/4g2eATo
[image or embed]
— Gil Durán (@gilduran.com) August 31, 2025 at 10:18 AM
The GREAT Trust was drafted by some of the same Israelis behind the controversial Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), whose aid distribution points in Gaza have been the sites of deliberate massacres and other incidents in which thousands of aid-seeking Palestinians have been killed or wounded.
According to the Post, financial modeling for the GREAT Trust proposal "was done by a team working at the time for the Boston Consulting Group"—which played a key role in creating GHF. BCG told the Post that the firm did not approve work on the trust plan, and that two senior partners who led the financial modeling were subsequently terminated.
The GREAT Trust envisions "a US-led multirlateral custodianship" lasting a decade or longer and leading to "a reformed Palestinian self-governance after Gaza is "demilitarized and de-radicalized."
Josh Paul—a former US State Department official who resigned in October 2023 over the Biden administration's decision to sell more arms to Israel as it waged a war on Gaza increasingly viewed by experts as genocidal—told Democracy Now! last week that Trump's plan for Gaza is "essentially a new form of colonialism, a transition from Israeli colonialism to corporate" colonialism.
The GREAT Trust contains two proposals for Gaza's more than 2 million Palestinians. Under one plan, approximately 75% of Gaza's population would remain in the strip during its transformation. The second proposal involves up to 500,000 Gazans relocating to third countries, 75% of them permanently.
The prospectus does not say how many Palestinians would leave Gaza under the relocation option. Those who choose to permanently relocate to other unspecified countries would each receive $5,000 plus four years of subsidized rent and subsidized food for a year.
The GREAT Trust allocates $6 billion for temporary housing for Palestinians who remain in Gaza and $5 billion for those who relocate.
The proposal projects huge profits for investors—nearly four times the return on investment and annual revenue of $4.5 billion within a decade. The project would be a boon for companies ranging from builders including Saudi bin Laden Group, infrastructure specialists like IKEA, the mercenary firm Academi (formerly Blackwater), US military contractor CACI—which last year was found liable for torturing Iraqis at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison—electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla, tech firms such as Amazon, and hoteliers Mandarin Oriental and IHG Hotels and Resorts.
Central to the plan are 10 "megaprojects," including half a dozen "smart cities," a regional logistics hub to be build over the ruins of the southern city of Rafah, a central highway named after Saudi Crown Prime Mohammed bin Salman—Saudi Arabia and other wealthy Gulf states feature prominently in the proposal as investors—large-scale solar and desalinization plants, a US data safe haven, an "Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone," and "Gaza Trump Riviera & Islands" similar to the Palm Islands in Dubai.
In addition to "massive" financial gains for private US investors, the GREAT Trust lists strategic benefits for the United States that would enable it to "strengthen" its "hold in the east Mediterranean and secure US industry access to $1.3 trillion of rare-earth minerals from the Gulf."
Earlier this year, Trump said the US would "take over" Gaza, American real estate developers would "level it out" and build the "Riviera of the Middle East" atop its ruins after Palestinians—"all of them"—leave Palestine's coastal exclave. The president called for the "voluntary" transfer of Gazans to Egypt and Jordan, both of whose leaders vehemently rejected the plan.
"Voluntary emigration" is widely considered a euphemism for ethnic cleansing, given Palestinians' general unwillingness to leave their homeland.
According to a May survey by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, nearly half of Gazans expressed a willingness to apply for Israeli assistance to relocate to other countries. However, many Gazans say they would never leave the strip, where most inhabitants are descendants of survivors of the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of more than 750,000 Palestinians during the creation of Israel in 1948. Some are actual Nakba survivors.
"I'm staying in a partially destroyed house in Khan Younis now," one Gazan man told the Post. "But we could renovate. I refuse to be made to go to another country, Muslim or not. This is my homeland."
The Post report follows a meeting last Wednesday at the White House, where Trump, senior administration officials, and invited guests including former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, investor and real estate developer Jared Kushner—who is also the president's son-in-law—and Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer discussed Gaza's future.
While Dermer reportedly claimed that Israel does not seek to permanently occupy Gaza, Israeli leaders including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes including murder and forced starvation in Gaza—have said they will conquer the entire strip and keep at least large parts of it.
"We conquer, cleanse, and stay until Hamas is destroyed," Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich recently said. "On the way, we annihilate everything that still remains."
The Israel Knesset also recently hosted a conference called "The Gaza Riviera–from vision to reality" where participants openly discussed the occupation and ethnic cleansing of the strip.
The publication of the GREAT Trust comes as Israeli forces push deeper into Gaza City amid a growing engineered famine that has killed at least hundreds of Palestinians and is starving hundreds of thousands of more. Israel's 696-day assault and siege on Gaza has left at least 233,200 Palestinians dead, wounded, or missing, according to the Gaza Health Ministry—whose casualty figures are seen as a likely undercount by experts.
Their "astonishing, powerful op-ed," said one professor, "drives home what we are losing and what's already been lost."
Nearly every living former director or acting director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from the past half-century took to the pages of The New York Times on Monday to jointly argue that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. "is endangering every American's health."
"Collectively, we spent more than 100 years working at the CDC, the world's preeminent public health agency. We served under multiple Republican and Democratic administrations," Drs. William Foege, William Roper, David Satcher, Jeffrey Koplan, Richard Besser, Tom Frieden, Anne Schuchat, Rochelle Walensky, and Mandy Cohen highlighted.
What RFK Jr. "has done to the CDC and to our nation's public health system over the past several months—culminating in his decision to fire Dr. Susan Monarez as CDC director days ago—is unlike anything we have ever seen at the agency, and unlike anything our country has ever experienced," the nine former agency leaders wrote.
Known for spreading misinformation about vaccines and a series of scandals, Kennedy was a controversial figure long before President Donald Trump chose him to lead HHS—a decision that Senate Republicans affirmed in February. However, in the wake of Monarez's ouster, fresh calls for him to resign or be fired have mounted.
This is powerful. Nine former CDC leaders just came together to defend SCIENCE.Maybe it’s time we LISTEN TO THEM—not the loud voices spreading MISINFORMATION.Science saves lives. Lies cost themwww.nytimes.com/2025/09/01/o...
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— Krutika Kuppalli, MD FIDSA (@krutikakuppalli.bsky.social) September 1, 2025 at 10:35 AM
As the ex-directors detailed:
Secretary Kennedy has fired thousands of federal health workers and severely weakened programs designed to protect Americans from cancer, heart attacks, strokes, lead poisoning, injury, violence, and more. Amid the largest measles outbreak in the United States in a generation, he's focused on unproven "treatments" while downplaying vaccines. He canceled investments in promising medical research that will leave us ill-prepared for future health emergencies. He replaced experts on federal health advisory committees with unqualified individuals who share his dangerous and unscientific views. He announced the end of US support for global vaccination programs that protect millions of children and keep Americans safe, citing flawed research and making inaccurate statements. And he championed federal legislation that will cause millions of people with health insurance through Medicaid to lose their coverage. Firing Dr. Monarez—which led to the resignations of top CDC officials—adds considerable fuel to this raging fire.
Monarez was nominated by Trump, and was confirmed by Senate Republicans in late July. As the op-ed authors noted, she was forced out by RFK Jr. just weeks later, after she reportedly refused "to rubber-stamp his dangerous and unfounded vaccine recommendations or heed his demand to fire senior CDC staff members."
"These are not typical requests from a health secretary to a CDC director," they wrote. "Not even close. None of us would have agreed to the secretary's demands, and we applaud Dr. Monarez for standing up for the agency and the health of our communities."
After Monarez's exit, Trump tapped Jim O'Neill, an RFK Jr. aide and biotech investor, as the CDC's interim director. Critics including Robert Steinbrook, director of Public Citizen's health research group, warn that "unlike Susan Monarez, O'Neill is likely to rubber-stamp dangerous vaccine recommendations from HHS Secretary Kennedy's handpicked appointees to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and obey orders to fire CDC public health experts with scientific integrity."
The agency's former directors didn't address O'Neill, but they wrote: "To those on the CDC staff who continue to perform their jobs heroically in the face of the excruciating circumstances, we offer our sincere thanks and appreciation. Their ongoing dedication is a model for all of us. But it's clear that the agency is hurting badly."
"We have a message for the rest of the nation as well: This is a time to rally to protect the health of every American," they continued. The experts called on Congress to "exercise its oversight authority over HHS," and state and local governments to "fill funding gaps where they can." They also urged philanthropy, the private sector, medical groups, and physicians to boost investments, "continue to stand up for science and truth," and support patients "with sound guidance and empathy."
Doctors, researchers, journalists, and others called their "must-read" piece "extraordinary" and "important."
"Just an astonishing, powerful op-ed that drives home what we are losing and what's already been lost," said University of Michigan Law School professor Leah Litman. "We are so incredibly fortunate to live with the advances [of] modern medicine and health science. Destroying and stymying it is just unforgivable."