PRESS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Wednesday, April 23, 2025
Contact for People’s CDC:
Lara Jirmanus, lara.jiramanus@gmail.com, cell (781) 864-8879, info@peoplescdc.org
Experts condemn Trump Administration Attacks on Science and Public Health, Call on Hospitals to Keep Patients Safe for All
Release journal article demonstrating simple infection control measures dramatically reduce hospital-acquired illness and death
Atlanta, Georgia and Boston, MA – The last few months have seen massive attacks on the public health sector, including gutting of research staff, vital programs, and public services from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Health and Human Services (HHS), as well as threats to vaccine access of all types.
New NIH funding guidelines, released on April 21, 2025, require that recipients of federal funds must certify that they do not not operate any programs which advance or promote diversity, equity, inclusion or accessibility, and that they do not engage in boycotts of Israel or companies doing business in Israel. U. S. government COVID.gov website has been replaced with an unsupported allegation that COVID was leaked from a lab in China.
Meanwhile, Immigrant and Customs Enforcement (ICE) threatens to expand deportation, including within hospital systems, with NYU’s Langone Hospital admitting immigrants will not be safe from deportation within their gates. And legislation and policies banning mask-wearing are being pushed across the country, infringing on our civil rights, autonomy, health and safety.
Amid these dramatic changes, healthcare workers and public health experts argue that hospitals have a strong role to play in keeping patients safe, from defending research and conditions of care that ensure all can have access to medicine, from anti-immigrant attacks and infectious disease alike. A new journal article in Journal of American Medicine Association (JAMA) Network Open shows that small decisions taken by hospitals can have an important impact on patient safety and wellbeing, reducing hospital-acquired illness from COVID. And public health advocates suggest that healthcare workers can have an important role in securing ongoing access to vital research funding, safe patient care, and protecting immigrant patients.
In a public webinar, on April 24, 2025 at at 11:30AM ET/8:30 AM PT, public health experts will highlight a four-prong strategy to #ProtectOurPatients. They are joined by the JAMA paper lead author Theodore Pak, MD, PhD
Registration link: https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_e3z4m1F3SneZKwms9jkrlA#/registration
The coalition of experts will review the current landscape and its impact on public health and introduce the #ProtectOurPatients Campaign, with four simple steps that healthcare workers can take to make health care safe.
They will call on fellow healthcare workers to encourage their employers to increase patient wellbeing by taking the #ProtectOurPatients Pledge. The pledge recognizes that hospitals should be sanctuaries from both disease and threats of deportation and detention, committing healthcare workers to advocate for anti-ICE policies, vaccine access and (vaccine education), universal masking policies and masking-rights legislation, as well as funding for vital science research.
Linking the Protect Our Patients pledge to the multilayered attacks on immigrants and science alike, Atlanta-based Nurse Rita Valenti, RN said: “as nurses we have a duty to keep our patients safe and cared for. The billionaires pushing dangerous policies and cutting access to necessary safety series and research funding, are more interested in their bottom lines than in patient safety – and that often includes our employers, the big for-profit healthcare companies. But as nurses, doctors and healthcare staff we have the power to push for safer policies, from refusing to share patient information with immigration officials, to fighting for vaccine access and wearing masks to keep our patients, and ourselves, safe from the spread of infectious disease.”
Lara Jirmanus, MD MPH Clinical Instructor of Medicine at Harvard said, “As doctors and researchers we have an ethical imperative to care for all and to develop research for everyone. The Trump administration attacks on our hospitals and on our science are making it impossible to do our jobs. From the new NIH funding guidelines to the shocking and unfounded assertions of the new U.S. government website, to the promise of immigration enforcement in hospitals, we can be certain of one thing: We are all at risk when our President dramatically overreaches the breadth of his power. If we live in the land of the free, we must have the freedom to care for all.”
Describing the JAMA study, Theodore Pak, MD PhD Clinical and Research Fellow in Infectious Diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital. stated: “We studied whether changes in testing and masking policy at ten New England hospitals could be linked to any changes in hospital-onset COVID using an interrupted time-series model. We found that ending testing and masking in May 2023 corresponded with a 25% increase in hospital-onset cases, and restarting the masking of staff during the following winter was associated with a 33% decrease.” Emphasizing the important role of additionally testing patients for COVID prior to hospital admission he added, “The use of universal masking and testing continues to have value in hospitals where there is a high concentration of vulnerable patients during times of substantial respiratory virus transmission.”
Speakers Include:
Noha Aboelata, MD, Roots Community Health Center
Theodore Pak, MD, PhD, Clinical and Research Fellow in Infectious Diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Lara Jirmanus, MD, MPH, People’s CDC and Clinical Instructor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School
Andrew Wang, PhD, MPH, CPH, Public Health Professional
Sam Halpert, JD, Lawyer and Accessibility Advocate
Rita Valenti, RN, People’s CDC and Project South
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