According to a recent Washington Post report, senior staff at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were told not to use certain words in budget submissions—words like “fetus,” “evidence-based,” and “diversity.” Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Nancy Krieger, in a December 18, 2017 op-ed in the New York Daily News, wrote that such a move could cause needless suffering and death.
Although it was later reported that CDC director Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald wrote an email to staff assuring them that the agency remains committed to its public health mission as a science- and evidence-based institution, Krieger, professor of social epidemiology at Harvard Chan School, wrote in her op-ed that Fitzgerald’s statement did not address five out of the seven forbidden words noted in the Post article, such as “vulnerable” and “transgender.” Wrote Krieger: “The silence is chilling.”
Krieger noted that censorship in public health can be either overt, by written policy or law, or a threat that leads to self-censorship. “Either way, it is lethal,” she wrote.
Censorship “does not make problems disappear,” she added. “To the contrary: It makes them fester and poisons the future.”
Read the New York Daily News op-ed: The censorship of seven words by Trump’s CDC could well cost American lives