Interests include the health impacts of environmental change and buyer diversity loss harmful algal blooms and the health effects of climate change Dr Looper headed the C.D.C.'s climate health program insolent was downgraded and deluded by the Trump White House in 2018 and for speaking out on the climate crisis and its public health effects in essence file for whistleblower status with the Justice Department's Office of Special Counsel and has just received the Joe a Callaway award for civic courage Welcome to the Ralph Nader Radio Hour Dr George . Thank you but you're welcome Mr Cooper Engressia Lincolns on your job or word for super courage to crudely deserve good I think good thing we get started please explain what an epidemiologist do I don't think there's enough of them in this country and they're desperately need 1000 epidemiologists do and what different areas a health and safety if they've been working on before we get into your situation Sure well let me I'll just leave it at that he had the. Covering you know an infinite amount of exposures and. We look for that between a particular exposure so bad air quality 'd and look who or what that might do this to a certain part of the population or the whole essentially you know there are data looking for cause illness and death and you know my expertise covers a wide range of environmental exposures that include bad water quality air quality extreme weather events and the like and try to build a case for why certain exposures are harmful to people this is give a specific example of your own experience now who do you mean known to such as yourself make connections they make causal connections to make own. Kinds of relationships that make us understand what's going on and for example if a new disease comes up and it's infectious epidemiologists will try to find where it came from the causes to try to find who's most vulnerable where the vulnerability is and maybe find situations where people are not as vulnerable and so absolutely critical in a highly technological society and there are just only a few 1000 epidemiologists operating in the United States so let's get to your area the Centers for Disease Control arguably is the single most important agent seen the federal government because if you dealing with global pandemics viral pandemics bacteria pandemics and the such you're doing with potentially tens of millions of fatalities and hundreds of millions of 2nd the says and yet its budget is about 7 and a half $1000000000.00 which is half of what the Pentagon spends on the ballistics missile defense program that has never worked since Reagan opened it with great fanfare they're now spending about $14000000000.00 a year already to cut rotors Now you had an 18 person staff inside the Center for Disease Control planet Georgia I believe the budget was about $10000000.00 then you are supposed to be looking into the connection between global public health and climate disruptions tornadoes destruction of had of a touch droughts widespread fires hurricanes and for example if you change the habitats the malarial carrying mosquitoes will spread malaria beyond its present regions now that's. An example of how epidemiology works you're working away at this and then the Trump regime opens its doors in January 2017 so explain to our listeners what have well I'm going to be happy to before I begin though it's important that I make it clear that you know what I'm presenting to you today is my own statement doesn't represent the federal government or the agency in which work these are my own opinions and my own statements and then I'm sitting here talking with you while I am on vacation leave so and I'm not using government time or resources to do so just to make clear to everybody that this is all my own so yeah the election happened in the fall of 2016 and a few weeks later I got called into the director's office the director for the Center National Center for Environmental networking and told me that you know we've got a problem I had been working on a large scientific meeting a 3 day meeting that was going to be held since he had Corps in Atlanta called of the climate health summit as a science meeting for 3 days and it was intended to raise awareness both within c.d.c. And the broader public health community that hey there are folks working on climate change and health were actually kind of an obscure part of public health but because recent statements by the World Health Organization director general market chanting the climate change is the single greatest threat to public health in the 21st century since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change releases 2014 reports didn't unequivocal either that humans are changing the earth's climate system and so on that we want to get public health who are you know have their traditional bunkers that they work in that there is groundbreaking work going on climate change and how we had organized a meeting again with a blind eye to politics which was rather naive considering what had been going on in the country and in my infinite wisdom I wanted to get high level speakers for our meeting and called on Al Gore if he would like to be our keynote speaker I thought he's a great advocate for climate change and apparently that was a mistake. As the director said you know you have this meeting planned for February just 3 weeks after the inauguration and he said You have canceled me and I was on the west and we've spent this past 67 months working on this and we've got a full agenda we've got invitees with dull paid for night out the door why we can't is meeting to the optics aren't good. And I said you think the office of the good if you cancel the meeting and the news press got a hold of this this kind of sounds like scientific censorship and we have a scientific integrity policy that prohibits us from doing this and they said the optics are good I want you to send out a letter cancellation and I said not going to do that I'm not sending out a letter with my name on it align my scientific belief that this is an important topic and they were surprised that I would be so up in it but I said no this is my professional credibility here if you want to cancel a meeting call your my boss you can get the meeting but I'm not doing it and so they sent out a press release shortly after that meeting was canceled and I just sealed myself for some difficult times and this was very technical agenda here it wasn't just a celebrity speaker who we had books on the subject these were really people who some 30000 to the nuances we had this will probably have the best scientists who we did was we solicited abstracts or short blurbs about what they'd like to see the research to speak on we had a panel select the appropriate speakers we had numerous sessions on very specific topic changes in how did you ology and waterborne diseases and you know very specific technical topics for public health that we organized in 2 sessions of several speakers and we were aiming to have the biggest and best meeting of this type of today and I think we had we had pulled together fantastic meeting with all kinds of partners rationalization and it was open to the press right yes Ok so I always thought the c.d.c. Was about as impervious to partisan political intrusion is would not compete to manipulate politically what the c.d.c. Does it didn't fund it adequately but it was considered an agency of professional independence and so I was pretty astonished even with my minimal regard for the Trump people that they began moving in now how did they move then did they appoint a new director. Who is taking orders did they put people at secondary levels under the new director I mean it's just astonishing that an agency that is full of Ph D.'s and m D's et cetera suddenly became a political football for Donald Trump who is called Climate Disruption quote a Chinese hoax and quote So how did this happen and it came down on you like a hammer We'll talk about that in a moment yeah you know in my 17 years at the agency I held the the exact same view that this was a science driven agency done so for the protection of people's health and that politics had nothing to do with it and I had operated my program and the strategies that wouldn't Boinc looting unfortunately inviting Al Gore in a political environment you know it's a wonderful organization with incredibly passionate and driven scientists that are so hungry for their mission that you know we spend inordinate amount of hours working on work that we do we just have enormous pride in and I have no direct knowledge of how this happened the individual that pricey The senator rector that asked me to cancel the meeting was put in place during the Obama administration and I think at that time we had a director that was on his way out we knew that but I I don't know who made that decision or the most frightening thing actually is that somebody would make a decision like this and then to supporting the potential blowback for the administration and that to me is frightening because it's the most insidious form of power and when you can get people to do things for you without even asking them that I think is the most frightening thing that people will act on your behalf in ways that they normally wouldn't merely out of fear of what you like to do so you know I suspect that's the case and I It frightens me that we would go down that path well one of the ways they kept you down was to reorganize which is a typical bureaucratic technique so what they took your 18 person climate in the health program and subsumed. Under a larger program dedicated to the problems of asthma. And so it was fair to say that your program while technically not abolished it was degraded and diluted and then they pushed you out for valid you to even talk to your 18 members not have and I understand that if you want to come back to where you worked for a visit you had to get permission and you were in a state of limbo suspended but not fired Could you describe. In addition I was escorted by armed guards when I needed to get some books out of my office and I had an armed escort they asked me to come at 11 am which is the height of the day when everybody is around intending to humiliate me and marched me through our large 10 story office building with a large armed guard behind me that even called me to the bathroom everything but shackles and irons cracked and and Robin my 17 years at the c.d.c. I've never been focused to sideways I've never been reprimanded in any way I've received outstanding performance reviews and promotions a lot any attempt at making my character unsavory so they did a number of things to the climate health program which is appropriated in a discrete line item in the budget which means Congress appropriate $10000000000.00 for climate health program at c.d.c. Since it's a direct line it cannot be by law used in any other way and I as a manager in charge of that appropriation I'm responsible for making sure that the public's money is managed in the proper way and that I'm a good steward of the public's money and it Congress says work on climate and health I cannot decide that this needs to be worked on grass of prevention and managed so what they did was they took the climate health program that was standalone and the out the program standalone along with a number of the programs and that one of them together and my program got merged with that and I was. Made the acting branch chief of the program and immediately my superiors had asked me to dismantle the team that I had built in climate change which is a highly unique team with unique set of expertise from climatology to geographic information systems and a team that I had built at its sole purpose was to work on this unique set of challenges and they wanted me to move those individuals into other teams in the Afghan program and I said well you can't do that because they're going to be supervising your supervisor people who are working on different lines and how are we going to get around that fact that you can't merge the personnel expenditure of their time between different programs and there was a command of one of my managers above me refused to answer that question but she had her name is Laura Johnson she had 2 contractors from Pricewaterhouse Coopers we talk on highly unusual and on and I had never seen this before work with me on an organizational plan for this new branch and encourage me to accept this new organizational plan that would essentially blend the money and I kept telling the contractors you can't do that so I quit or says you can and I said well you can't I've taken a corporation's classes I have to and why is it more in this meeting where she couldn't come and this went on for several weeks and I refused to said this unless we could address this topic of the appropriations which I am responsible for so I could get in trouble if I allowed that to happen because I know that it's illegal and I said Lori needs to tell me what the workaround is for this mixing up the money because I don't see how we could happen and I'm not happy with this and as we went back and forth back and forth never with a response from Laurie about the appropriateness of this I was called into a meeting with the senior managers in the center and it was quite odd because you know got a call up to this the director's office one day and I sat down and one of the deputy director for the center Donica newts and said We have some troubling allegations against you. Like. What are you talking about she said did you author a book in 20. And I said well yeah I authored a textbook on climate change hell and she says we have no records in the ethics approval office because this was an act of it on my own and I got a horrible to do it and I had to I had to let you see that the talk was working up to what we have no evidence that actually perceive that it's a group or let it I have or my all let me go get it that no you need to have your own your badge and your keys and we're going to you need to leave campus now because I mean you're up to this is the listeners the kind of top down Inquisition that they impose on people of conscience and competence in state bureaucracies federal state local and corporate bureaucracy the larger point that Dr Lubert is making is that he refused to spend money contrary to what was authorized for his program by the u.s. Congress he refused to spend money because if you spend money in an authorized way that is a violation of the n.t. Deficiency Act which prescribe a felony as a punishment not to take an even bigger arc what Donald Trump was doing was doing his throughout referred to regulatory agencies moving money around for purposes that wasn't authorized such as moving money from the Defense Department for schools and other social services for the children of military families to build his so-called wall on the Mexican border that's a crime that's not just an impeachable offense it's a crime under the n.t. Deficiency well off any other web you were caught up with we're talking where Dr George the Liber who was the head of the climate Health Program at the Centers for Disease Control on the planet the other aspect of this is he is 18 in n. a Betting a tremendous threat to our national security which is kind. Disruption it's already blowing apart communities and you see it on our t.v. News and so it's not just that he's stopping you from trying to head it off in your particular way and stopping others from trying to minimize or mitigate these huge slow arms in tornadoes and droughts cetera short term and long term he's actually making it worse by unleashing coal burning pollution and scrapping controls Nandor on greenhouse gases go all yo gas go cold he calls coal clean beautiful coal so he's 18 in an Ev Betty a massive assault from an abuse nature against the health and safety and property values of our country and actually making it worse that should be an n.p. Jubal offense that Congress should pay attention to in a way where you know I mean you're sitting outside your workplace outside the Centers for Disease Control you've given a media interviews you're very good about communicating with the media are they trying to stop you from doing now have the suspended your pay you know fortunately they had certainly charges in October of last year and 18 and with the help of lawyers from an organization called Peer look of course from our responsibility we were able to have those charges completely removed they had accused me of all kinds of fabricating and just I mean so poorly done they are I'm also a professor at Emory and university and I teach a class there regularly on climate and health and they had accused me of having my subordinates teach classes for me and which I didn't and they said I was having them teach classes that I never even talked to they never bothered to check the class schedule to see if that course even existed and they said you know if you had me teach a class on the kind of a topic class that some. The else and numbers of just anonymous accusations of something that I was able to you know concretely show evidence of that wasn't even true it was just remarkably poorly done which on a.b.c. I think I'm grateful for the competence of the staff at the center they were not able to put together a credible set of charges maybe it was done in order to help me I'm hoping that an influx of the inside the decent solidarity in this country about trumped up charges is a yes it was and they removed all of them so they suspended you for 120 days to prevent you from speaking to the media they prevented me from speaking to the media going back before they remove me from my position this goes back right after the Al Gore debacle they cut off all my media active travel access and that drug on for about a year and plus and then after my obstinance with not doing their dirty work with the appropriations money that's when I was removed from campus and since then that was March 18th I have been moved to different assignments around c.d.c. In assignment that are unrelated to frankly things that I have expertise and and I've been bounced around to them on my 4th assignment and I'm still working and I'm prohibited from coming to the campus in which I'm assigned to I work from home a lot of percent of the time I still lighted and I review now the scientific manuscripts on laboratory analysis of environmental exposure something which I am profoundly unqualified to do so I'm part of the clearance chain for laboratory manuscripts listeners should know that one of the 1st things done I'm from did was order the banning of the use of the term climate change not only to Centers for Disease Control but at the Environment Protection Agency the other agencies and this is like right out of the Kremlin in Stalinist Russia and the 2nd thing I didn't like you appearing with Matt Damon in a show called Years of Living Dangerously. Well that was during the Obama years and actually we got a good bit of support for that I think there perhaps with the current crop of managers at the center don't like the attention this topic is getting and you know it is our our little unit was one of the most productive in the center and was also the one that they felt gave them the most vulnerability politically and so anything they could do to and they said to me you need to lay low take a low profile and I saw this as a tremendous opportunity to work to raise our profile and I would use to do so we were in discussions with the National Geographic Channel and Mars series which is a very successful show there for me to be a regular contributor to and I receive an e-mail think George will never be on that show capitals obit underlined and they did not want me to seek media attention and part of my job is to raise awareness on this is