The head of Baltimore County’s health department is bracing for the Trump administration’s plan to cut more than $11 billion in COVID funding. The money is being pulled from local and state health departments and health organizations nationwide.
County Health Officer Dr. Lucy Wilson said this is the first time an action by the Trump administration is directly threatening county health department funding.
She said the COVID money can be used for things such as “disease investigation, disease response, education, community outreach and a number of other areas as well.”
Wilson is not sure how much money is at stake.
“We are still trying to understand what the announced cuts mean for our county,” Wilson said.
Lori Freeman, CEO of the National Association of County & City Health Officials told the Associated Press that some of the COVID money is used for other public health issues such as wastewater surveillance that began during COVID and has become important for detecting other diseases, too.
“It was being used in significant ways to track flu and patterns of new disease and emerging diseases — and even more recently with the measles outbreak,” Freeman said.
In announcing the plan, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement, “The COVID-19 pandemic is over, and HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago.”
Although the COVID federal public health emergency has ended, the virus is still killing people in the U.S. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 458 people per week on average have died from COVID over the past four weeks.
Meantime Wilson said it’s too early to say how Baltimore County will be impacted by the feds’ plan to lay off 10,000 workers at Health and Human Services.
“We are working with both the state government and our local government to understand better what some of these changes mean,” WIlson said.
U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Junior said HHS will do more with less.
