The simmering showdown between US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the leadership of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has finally boiled over.

The White House said on Wednesday that CDC director Susan Monarez was fired — and Monarez’s representatives quickly responded that she wouldn’t leave her post without a fight. In protest of the ousting and Kennedy’s leadership, four senior CDC leaders resigned.

The tension had been building for months. Once Kennedy took the helm of the US Department of Health and Human Services, he laid off thousands of workers at the CDC and other health agencies. He has rolled back longstanding vaccine policies over the objections of many experts inside and outside of the CDC. Then, earlier this month, a man angry about the Covid-19 vaccines fired nearly 200 bullets into a CDC office building. Although no one was hurt, CDC workers criticized Kennedy and others for stoking anti-CDC sentiment and for not speaking out after the incident. President Donald Trump has still not publicly commented on the shooting.

The final straw came yesterday when the Food and Drug Administration announced limited approval of new Covid vaccines updated to better match the variants currently circulating. The FDA approved the new shots — but only for the elderly and people who are at higher risk because of underlying health conditions. The vaccines had previously been approved for all Americans 6 months of age and older. The CDC would have been expected to make new Covid vaccine recommendations that matched the FDA’s narrower approval, excluding healthy adults, pregnant women, and children — but, according to the New York Times, Monarez refused to commit to that policy in a private meeting with Kennedy

What happened next was chaos. National news outlets reported Wednesday afternoon that Monarez had been fired, less than a month after her Senate confirmation. Over the next few hours, Monarez’s representatives responded that she was refusing to step down (her attorney suggests that her firing had been illegal), but the White House insisted she had, in fact, been terminated. And so began an exodus of more CDC leaders.

One of those officials — Demetre Daskalakis, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases — explained why he was leaving the agency in a post on X. He portrayed the CDC situation as an existential battle between science and anti-science, noting in his post that no one on his team had ever even briefed Kennedy since he was sworn in as US health secretary in April.

“I am unable to serve in an environment that treats CDC as a tool to generate policies and materials that do not reflect scientific reality and are designed to hurt rather than to improve the public’s health,” Daskalakis wrote. “Public health is not merely about the health of the individual, but it is about the health of the community, the nation, the world. The nation’s health security is at risk and is in the hands of people focusing on ideological self-interest.”

The CDC that will be left behind will be less science-driven and more beholden to Kennedy and his agenda — precisely the warning that the departing CDC officials are trying to send and a sentiment echoed by other public health organizations. “THE SUSTAINED ATTACKS ON PUBLIC HEALTH IN THE U.S. MUST END NOW,” read an all-caps statement sent by the Infectious Disease Society of America to the media.

But there’s a bigger story here than just the latest drama under Kennedy’s leadership: What’s unfolding is a fight over the narrative of public health in America — and for the public’s trust.

The American public is still unmoored after the Covid-19 pandemic, and two sides are trying to win out: Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again movement along with the critics who attacked the public health establishment during that emergency, and the public health experts aligned with America’s scientific institutions. The outcome will determine the future of collective health in the US.

Kennedy argues that the public health establishment of the previous generation has failed the public and must be razed and replaced. If you look at the recent CDC personnel issues through this lens, then dismissing public health officials with decades of experience in their field is in service of that goal. On the other side, most scientists, public health experts, and CDC officials would argue that public health largely has a record of success — though with some mistakes and failures along the way.

America’s public health institutions did lose some trust during the pandemic amid confusing and often inconsistent guidance. But a longer record of vaccinations driving down disease and other public health campaigns yielding major gains in people’s well-being is clear from historical data and decades of peer-reviewed research.

Science may be on the CDC officials’ side, but we’re still learning exactly how the public actually feels about public health. How average people react to this drama and the conflicting messages that Kennedy and CDC officials are sending will determine the long-term consequences of this fight.

How does the public really feel about public health?

This parade of firings and principled resignations is in part a performance — and the audience is the American public.

As I have written before, 25 years ago, there was a pretty clear public health consensus in America. The federal government and major medical organizations were usually aligned on the major questions — questions like which vaccines to get. And the public was widely in support. In 2001, around the time the US declared measles had been eradicated, more than 90 percent of US adults said it was “extremely” or “very important” for people to get childhood vaccinations.

It is difficult to imagine such unanimity about any public health-related issue today.

Right now, the percentage of Americans who think childhood immunizations are important is below 70 percent. According to a 2024 Pew Research Center survey, only 26 percent of Americans have a great deal of faith in scientists to act in the best interests of the public, about the same percentage as those who say they have not too much or none at all (23 percent). That is much lower than in 2019, the pre-pandemic era, when 36 percent of Americans said they had a great deal of faith in science being in the public’s best interest and only 12 percent had none or little.

Most Americans are stuck in the middle; 50 percent say they have a “fair” amount of trust in scientists. One way to think about this group is that they are up for grabs.

Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again movement has gained steam because many Americans desire a fresh approach to health and wellness; Kennedy remains one of the more popular active political figures in the country, despite criticism from all corners of the public health establishment. As the country’s top health official, Kennedy argues he has a mandate to overhaul public health policy on everything from vaccines, to the food supply, to fluoride in public water systems.

But the health risks of Kennedy’s policy agenda are real, and that is the message that public health experts, including the resigning CDC leaders, are trying to deliver to the public.

The US has already seen what happens when childhood vaccination rates drop, with the worst measles outbreak in 30 years taking hold this year in a poorly vaccinated Texas community. Dentists in Utah, where Kennedy helped herald the removal of fluoride from local water systems in April, are preparing for a surge in cavities. The introduction of fluoride into US water systems led to a large decline in cavities over many years; now, Kennedy’s policy agenda could move the country backward.

And now, the new restrictions on Covid vaccines announced yesterday could make it more difficult for many people to get them. Vaccines may not be as widely available at pharmacies, and insurers may not be willing to cover the vaccine without government approval. That could make it harder for both vulnerable people and their loved ones to get Covid shots. The science is clear on the relative safety of the Covid shots, and Kennedy has been criticized for the weak evidence that he has cited to justify the changes to the Covid vaccine guidance. People could get sick if these shots are harder to come by because of Kennedy’s policies.

This is always a challenge in public health.

Short of emergency lockdowns and mandates, public health has always been about soft power: Can you persuade the public to take certain precautions in the best interest of not only themselves but the people around them? And that authority is always fluctuating. Around 90 percent of Americans get their childhood shots, but less than 50 percent usually get their flu shot in a given year.

Now, the headwinds facing good public health policy are stronger than ever, with Kennedy and his movement representing an active opponent of many well-supported public health interventions in charge of US health policy. For a while, Monerez, Daskalakis, and others seemed prepared to try to work within the system that Kennedy controlled. But they no longer believe that is possible, so they are taking the fight to the public.

Let’s start with one unambiguous fact: More children are diagnosed with autism today than in the early 1990s.

According to a sweeping 2000 analysis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a range of 2–7 per 1,000, or roughly 0.5 percent of US children, were diagnosed with autism in the 1990s. That figure has risen to 1 in 35 kids, or roughly 3 percent.

The apparent rapid increase caught the attention of people like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who assumed that something had to be changing in the environment to drive it. In 2005, Kennedy, a lawyer and environmental activist at the time, authored an infamous essay in Rolling Stone that primarily placed the blame for the increased prevalence of autism on vaccines. (The article was retracted in 2011 as more studies debunked the vaccine-autism connection.) More recently, he has theorized that a mysterious toxin introduced in the late 1980s must be responsible.

Now, as the nation’s top health official leading the Department of Health and Human Services, Kennedy has declared autism an “epidemic.” And, in April, he launched a massive federal effort to find the culprit for the rise in autism rates, calling for researchers to examine a range of suspects: chemicals, molds, vaccines, and perhaps even ultrasounds given to pregnant mothers.

“Genes don’t cause epidemics. You need an environmental toxin,” Kennedy said in April when announcing his department’s new autism research project. He argued that too much money had been put into genetic research — “a dead end,” in his words — and his project would be a correction to focus on environmental causes. “That’s where we’re going to find an answer.”

But according to many autism scientists I spoke to for this story, Kennedy is looking in exactly the wrong place.

Autism is a complex disorder with a range of manifestations that has long defied simple explanations, and it’s unlikely that we will ever identify a single “cause” of autism.

But scientists have learned a lot in the past 50 years, including identifying some of the most important risk factors. They are not, as Kennedy suggests, out in our environment. They are written into our genetics. What appeared to be a massive increase in autism was actually a byproduct of better screening and more awareness.

“The way the HHS secretary has been walking about his plans, his goals, he starts out with this basic assumption that nothing worthwhile has been done,” Helen Tager-Flusberg, a psychologist at Boston University who has worked with and studied children with autism for years, said. “Genes play a significant role. We know now that autism runs in families… There is no single underlying factor. Looking for that holy grail is not the best approach.”

Doctors who treat children with autism often talk about how they wish they could provide easy answers to the families. The answers being uncovered through genetics research may not be simple per se, but they are answers supported by science.

Kennedy is muddying the story, pledging to find a silver-bullet answer where likely none exists. It’s a false promise — one that could cause more anxiety and confusion for the very families Kennedy says he wants to help.

The autism “epidemic” that wasn’t

Autism was first described in 1911, and for many decades, researchers and clinicians confused the social challenges and language development difficulties common among those with the condition for a psychological issue. Some child therapists even blamed the condition on bad parenting.

But in 1977, a study discovered that identical twins, who share all of their DNA, were much more likely to both be autistic than fraternal twins, who share no more DNA than ordinary siblings. It marked a major breakthrough in autism research, and pushed scientists to begin coalescing around a different theory: There was a biological factor.

At the time, this was just a theory — scientists lacked the technology to prove those suspicions at the genetic level. And clinicians were also still trying to work out an even more fundamental question: What exactly was autism?

For a long time, the criteria for diagnosing a person with autism was strictly based on speech development. But clinicians were increasingly observing children who could acquire basic language skills but still struggled with social communication — things like misunderstanding nonverbal cues or taking figurative language literally. Psychologists gradually broadened their definition of autism from a strict and narrow focus on language, culminating in a 2013 criteria that included a wide range of social and emotional symptoms with three subtypes — the autism spectrum disorder we’re familiar with today.

Along the way, autism had evolved from a niche diagnosis for the severely impaired to something that encompassed far more children.

It makes sense then, that as the broad criteria for autism expanded, more and more children would meet it, and autism rates would rise. That’s precisely what happened. And it means that the “epidemic” that Kennedy and other activists have been fixated on is mostly a diagnostic mirage.

Historical autism data is spotty and subject to these same historical biases, but if you look at the prevalence of profound autism alone — those who need the highest levels of support — a clearer picture emerges. (There is an ongoing debate in the autism community about whether to use the terminology of “profound autism” or “high support needs” for those who have the most severe form of the condition.) In the ’80s and ’90s, low-support needs individuals would have been less likely to receive an autism diagnosis given the more restrictive criteria and less overall awareness of the disorder, meaning that people with severe autism likely represented most of the roughly 0.5 percent of children diagnosed with autism in the 1990s. (One large analysis from Atlanta examining data from 1996 found that 68 percent of kids ages 3 to 10 diagnosed with autism had an IQ below 70, the typical cutoff for intellectual disability.)

By 2025, when about 3 percent of children are being diagnosed with autism, about one in four of those diagnosed are considered to have high-support needs autism, those with most severe manifestation of the condition. That would equal about 0.8 percent of all US children — which would be a fairly marginal increase from autism rates 30 years ago. Or look at it another way: In 2000, as many as 60 percent of the people being diagnosed with autism had an intellectual disability, one of the best indicators of high-support needs autism. In 2022, that percentage was less than 40 percent.

As a recently published CDC report on autism prevalence among young children concluded, the increase in autism rates can largely be accounted for by stronger surveillance and more awareness among providers and parents, rather than a novel toxin or some other external factor driving an increase in cases.

Other known risk factors — like more people now having babies later in their life, given that parental age is linked to a higher likelihood of autism — are more likely to be a factor than anything Kennedy is pointing at, experts say.

“It’s very clear it’s not going to be one environmental toxin,” said Alison Singer, founder of the Autism Science Foundation and parent of a child with profound autism. “If there were a smoking gun, I think they would have found it.”

The “dead end” that’s actually given us a clearer understanding of autism’s complexity

While Kennedy has fixated on vaccines and environmental influences, scientists have gained more precision in mapping human genetics and identifying the biological mechanisms that appear to be a primary cause of autism. And that not only helps us understand why autism develops, but potentially puts long-elusive therapies within reach.

It began with an accident in the 1990s.

Stephen Scherer, now director of the Center for Applied Genomics at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, began his career in the late 1980s trying to identify the gene that caused cystic fibrosis — in collaboration with Francis Collins, who went on to lead the Human Genome Project that successfully sequenced all of the DNA in the human genome in the early 2000s. Scherer and Collins’s teams focused on chromosome 7, identified as a likely target by the primitive genetic research available at the time, a coincidence that would reorient Scherer’s career just a few years later, putting him on the trail of autism’s genetic roots.

After four years, the researchers concluded that one gene within chromosome 7 caused cystic fibrosis. Soon after Scherer helped crack the code on cystic fibrosis, in the mid-1990s, two parents from California called him: He was the world’s leading expert on chromosome 7, and recent tests had revealed that their children with autism had a problem within that particular chromosome.

That very same week, Scherer says, he read the findings of a study by a group at Oxford University, which had looked at the chromosomes of families with two or more kids with autism. They, too, had identified problems within chromosome 7.

“So I said, ‘Okay, we’re going to work on autism,’” Scherer told me. He helped coordinate a global research project, uniting his Canadian lab with the Oxford team and groups in the US to run a database that became the Autism Genome Project, still the world’s largest repository of genetic information of people with autism.

They had a starting point — one chromosome — but a given chromosome contains hundreds of genes. And humans have, of course, 45 other chromosomes, any of which conceivably might play a role. So over the years, they collected DNA samples from thousands upon thousands of people with autism, sequenced their genes, and then searched for patterns. If the same gene is mutated or missing across a high percentage of autistic people, it goes on the list as potentially associated with the condition.

Scientists discovered that autism has not one genetic factor, but many — further evidence that this is a condition of complex origin, in which multiple variables likely play a role in its development, rather than one caused by a single genetic error like sickle-cell anemia.

Here is one way to think about how far we have come: Joseph Buxbaum, the director of the Seaver Autism Center for Research and Treatment at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, entered autism genetics research 35 years ago. He recalls scientists being hopeful that they might identify a half dozen or so genes linked to autism.

They have now found 500 genes — and Buxbaum told me he believed they might find a thousand before they are through. These genetic factors continue to prove their value in predicting the onset of autism: Scherer pointed to one recent study in which the researchers identified people who all shared a mutation in the SHANK3 gene, one of the first to be associated with autism, but who were otherwise unalike: They were not related and came from different demographic backgrounds. Nevertheless, they had all been diagnosed with autism.

Precisely how much genetics contributes to the development of autism remains the subject of ongoing study. By analyzing millions of children with autism and their parents for patterns in diagnoses, multiple studies have attributed about 80 percent of a person’s risk of developing autism to their inherited genetic factors.

But of course 80 percent is not 100 percent. We don’t yet have the full picture of how or why autism develops. Among identical twins, for example, studies have found that in most cases, if one twin has high-support needs autism, the other does as well, affirming the genetic effect. But there are consistently a small minority of cases — 5 and 10 percent of twin pairs, Scherer told me — in which one twin has relatively low-support needs while the one requires a a high degree of support for their autism.

Kennedy is not wholly incorrect to look at environmental factors — researchers theorize that autism may be the result of a complex interaction between a person’s genetics and something they experience in utero.

Scientists in autism research are exploring the possible influence when, for example, a person’s mother develops maternal diabetes, high blood sugar that persists throughout pregnancy. And yet even if these other factors do play some role, the researchers I spoke to agree that genetics is, based on what we know now, far and away the most important driver.

“We need to figure out how other types of genetics and also environmental factors affect autism’s development,” Scherer said. “There could be environmental changes…involved in some people, but it’s going to be based on their genetics and the pathways that lead them to be susceptible.”

While the precise contours of Health Department’s new autism research project is still taking shape, Kennedy has that researchers at the National Institutes of Health will collect data from federal programs such as Medicare and Medicaid and somehow use that information to identify possible environmental exposures that lead to autism. He initially pledged results by September, a timeline that, as outside experts pointed out, may be too fast to allow for a thorough and thoughtful review of the research literature. Kennedy has since backed off on that deadline, promising some initial findings in the fall but with more to come next year.

RFK Jr.’s autism commission research risks the accessibility of groundbreaking autism treatments

If Kennedy were serious about moving autism science forward, he would be talking more about genetics, not dismissing them. That’s because genetics is where all of the exciting drug development is currently happening.

A biotech firm called Jaguar Gene Therapy has received FDA approval to conduct the first clinical trial of a gene therapy for autism, focused on SHANK3. The treatment, developed in part by one of Buxbaum’s colleagues, is a one-time injection that would replace a mutated or missing SHANK3 gene with a functional one. The hope is that the therapy would improve speech and other symptoms among people with high-needs autism who have also been diagnosed with a rare chromosomal deletion disorder called Phelan-McDermid syndrome; many people with this condition also have Autism spectrum disorder.

The trial will begin this year with a few infant patients, 2 years old and younger, who have been diagnosed with autism. Jaguar eventually aims to test the therapy on adults over 18 with autism in the future. Patients are supposed to start enrolling this year in the trial, which is focused on first establishing the treatment’s safety; if it proves safe, another round of trials would start to rigorously evaluate its effectiveness.

“This is the stuff that three or four years ago sounded like science fiction,” Singer said. “The conversation has really changed from Is this possible? to What are the best methods to do it? And that’s based on genetics.”

Researchers at Mount Sinai have also experimented with delivering lithium to patients and seeing if it improves their SHANK3 function. Other gene therapies targeting other genes are in earlier stages of development. Some investigators are experimenting with CRISPR technology, the revolutionary new platform for gene editing, to target the problematic genes that correspond to the onset of autism.

But these scientists fear that their work could be slowed by Kennedy’s insistence on hunting for environmental toxins, if federal dollars are instead shifted into his new project. They are already trying to subsist amid deep budget cuts across the many funding streams that support the institutions where they work.

“Now we have this massive disruption where instead of doing really key experiments, people are worrying about paying their bills and laying off their staff and things,” Scherer said. “It’s horrible.”

For the families of people with high-needs autism, Kennedy’s crusade has stirred conflicting emotions. Alison Singer, the leader of the Autism Science Foundation, is also the parent of a child with profound autism. When I spoke with her, I was struck by the bind that Kennedy’s rhetoric has put people like her and her family in.

Singer told me profound autism has not received enough federal support in the past, as more emphasis was placed on individuals who have low support needs included in the expanding definitions of the disorder, and so she appreciates Kennedy giving voice to those families. She believes that he is sincerely empathetic toward their predicament and their feeling that the mainstream discussion about autism has for too long ignored their experiences in favor of patients with lower support needs. But she worries that his obsession with environmental factors will stymie the research that could yield breakthroughs for people like her child.

“He feels for those families and genuinely wants to help them,” Singer said. “The problem is he is a data denier. You can’t be so entrenched in your beliefs that you can’t see the data right in front of you. That’s not science.”

For many months now, the city of Milwaukee has been grappling with a lead poisoning crisis that has forced at least four schools to temporarily close and dozens more to undergo rigorous inspections.

It began on January 13, when Milwaukee first notified parents at one grade three to five school that a child had tested positive for high levels of lead in their blood. Local health officials determined the lead exposure did not occur at the child’s home, which left their school as the obvious culprit.

City investigators found chipped lead paint and lead-laden dust throughout the school building; press and government reports indicate that the school district has struggled to keep up with paint maintenance requests, due to a lack of funding and manpower. Local officials soon realized they had a big problem on their hands, as the vast majority of the city’s school buildings (roughly 125 out of 150) were built before 1978, when lead paint was banned.

Lead, a dangerous neurotoxin that can lead to development problems in children after prolonged exposure, has now been detected in at least nine public schools, and at least four students have tested positive for high lead levels in their blood. So far, no children have been hospitalized for acute lead poisoning, which can be life-threatening, but the affected kids continue to be monitored. Several buildings have been temporarily closed so workers can do a deep clean. Milwaukee has been inspecting all of its public schools for lead, with the goal of completing the review by September.

Normally, cities navigating such a crisis could depend on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for federal support. When the lead poisoning was first detected in January, at the tail end of the Biden administration, city health officials were immediately in contact with the CDC environmental health team, which included several of the country’s top lead poisoning experts, Milwaukee health commissioner Mike Totoraitis told me. A group of federal experts were planning a trip to the city at the end of April.

But not anymore. In early April, the Trump administration denied Milwaukee’s request for support because there was no longer anybody on the government’s payroll who could provide the lead poisoning expertise the city needs.

On April 1, the lead exposure team within the CDC’s National Center for Environmental Health was laid off as part of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s massive restructuring of the federal health department. The planned trip was canceled, and no federal officials have stepped foot in Milwaukee since to aid in the response.

“We were talking to [the federal experts] multiple times each week,” Totoraitis said, “before they were let go.”

Milwaukee has pushed ahead with its own inspection and free blood testing clinics. The city reported on May 13 that it had replaced 10,000 lead water service lines, in an attempt to remove another possible source of exposure for local children. But they still have 55,000 more left to go, and local officials have said they would need state or federal funding to finish the job. (It is estimated to cost the city about $630 million.)

Ordinarily, Totoraitis said, the CDC experts would serve as the city’s subject matter experts, guiding them through their epidemiological investigations. Federal officials are especially adept at the detective work that can determine whether a child was exposed at home or at the school. Milwaukee officials had recent experience with lead exposures in homes but not in schools; they were relying on federal expertise to interpret lead dust levels that were found during the school inspections. Without them, they’ve been left to navigate a novel and dangerous health threat on their own.

“They were there for that sole purpose of having some of the best subject matter expertise on lead poisoning, and it’s gone now,” Totoraitis said. “Now we don’t have any experts at the CDC to reach out to.”

In this uncertain new era for public health, Milwaukee’s experience may become all too common: a city left to fend for itself amid an emergency. What in the past might have been a national scandal could become all too routine.

This is what happens when the federal government won’t respond to a health crisis

When I spoke with Totoraitis, he was already contemplating the next public health problem he would have to deal with. “If we have a new emerging health issue, that I don’t have internal expertise on and neither does the state, we don’t have anyone to call now,” Totoraitis said. “That’s a scary endeavor.”

He can’t be sure what kind of help he will be able to get from the federal government as the restructuring at the US Department of Health and Human Services continues. The department just rehired hundreds of health workers focused on workplace safety, but other teams, including the lead team, have not been brought back.

The turmoil makes it harder for local officials to keep track of which federal experts are still on staff, where they are located, and who has actually been let go. But the message is clear: President Donald Trump and his senior deputies want state and local governments to take on more of these responsibilities — without a helping hand from the feds.

The US public health system has been set up so that the state and local health departments are the front line, monitoring emerging problems and providing personnel in a crisis. The federal government supplies insights that state and local officials probably don’t have on their own. That is what Totoraitis was depending on; Milwaukee was inexperienced with lead exposures in large public buildings before this year’s emergency. (One of the laid-off CDC scientists has since sought to volunteer to help Milwaukee, as Stat recently reported; the person told me they were hoping to help with community engagement, which federal officials would usually assist with.)

Health crises happen all the time. Right now, there is a small tuberculosis outbreak in Kansas; a Florida town experienced the unexpected spread of hepatitis last December. A dozen people have been hospitalized in a listeria outbreak. And the US is currently facing its largest outbreak of measles in decades, with more than 1,000 people sickened. At one point, local officials said that the federal government had cut off funding for the outbreak response as part of a massive clawback of federal funds at the end of March, although the CDC has since sent additional workers to West Texas where the outbreak originated.

There used to be little doubt the federal government would step up in these scenarios. But Totoraitis warns that Milwaukee’s experience of the past few months, left to fend for itself in an emergency, could soon be repeated elsewhere.

“Let’s say next year this time, St. Louis is in a similar situation — they could call us, but we don’t have the bandwidth to consistently support them,” Totoraitis said. “This unfortunately is a great example of how quickly changes in the federal government can affect local government.”

Kids are being poisoned by lead. Trump is letting it happen.

Kennedy, Trump, and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency gleefully cut 10,000 jobs from US health agencies this spring. The cost of those losses will be felt every time a city is confronted with an unexpected health threat. Today, in Milwaukee, families are facing the fear and uncertainty of lead exposure — and they know federal help isn’t coming. As one Milwaukee mom told ABC News recently: “It really sends the message of, ‘You don’t matter.’”