“The pandemic was a category five hurricane for public health, and it was one that public health nationwide was not prepared for because of critical, low funding levels and lack of infrastructure maintenance over a very long period of time. The pandemic exposed a lot of that, and public health responded robustly anyway for the sake of our communities,” Edney told MPB News.
“The hurricane is over, but the damage was still there, and it makes as much sense to kill this funding now as it would have been to have stopped funding for the rebuild after Katrina just because the hurricane had passed.”
During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and extending into its wake, public health staff numbers decreased along with outreach efforts, and data collection to fight the spread of diseases lagged behind.
The $11 billion allocated by congress to individual states was meant to build those systems back up, in some cases into more robust systems than before the pandemic.
According to MSDH, the grant cuts will have their worst impact on immunization campaigns, preparedness for emerging viruses, like Bird Flu, and their community health worker system, which the Department developed and has begun to implement under Edney’s leadership.
“It's just horribly ineffective and inefficient to pull funding in the middle of work. It's one thing to claw back funding that's not being utilized; it's another thing to stop in the middle of that work by pulling funding without doing any investigation into how we're actually using the funding,” Edney said.
“We were rebuilding infrastructure for public health in the way Mississippians needed us to, with critically important federal funding that had been congressionally appropriated, already obligated, contracts in place, work going on, partners being funded that we all had to bring to a very abrupt stop.”
23 states, plus Washington D.C., have filed a federal lawsuit to block the grant cuts. Mississippi is not among them.
