My copy of CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) arrived in my email this morning. I’ve been reading it off and on since grad school in the very early 1980’s when it used to arrive in the mail as a small, thin, stapled publication you could fold up and stick in a shirt pocket. For some reason, I thought today’s issue was a little light in content.

And then I wondered why trump (small man, small ‘t’) had not suppressed this publication; it seems like the kind of idiotic, pointless thing he would do. But apparently, he did. For mental health reasons, I haven’t been following too much cable news, so I missed this: Trump’s Gag Order Halts CDC Publication. And then I saw Sen. Dick Durban’s PR from yesterday: “Durbin Calls On The Trump Administration To Immediately End Suppression Of The CDC’s [MMWR].

Durbin notes: “Since January 13, 1961, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has—without fail—published weekly issues of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), the agency’s routine update to doctors, health departments, researchers, and the public about infectious disease outbreaks, emerging health findings, and urgent new health care updates.”

Some of the first warnings about the emergence of multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) and extremely drug-resistant TB (XTR-TB) first appeared in the MMWR. The first reports of a mysterious virus causing serious neurological problems and killing vast numbers of birds (West Nile Virus) appeared in this publication. The first case reports of gay men with a fatal immune deficiency also appeared here, altering doctors to be on the lookout for this syndrome (HIV).

Suppressing this publication is like removing all the smoke detectors from a building. Why would anyone want to do that?