Former CDC employee reflects on gains made through now-shuttered DEI programs
Benita Harris was one of the few young Black workers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the 1990s when history called. President Bill Clinton needed help.
Clinton wanted to officially apologize for the Tuskegee Study, an infamous federal project that withheld medical treatment from Black men in Alabama with syphilis for 40 years beginning in 1932. Harris’ mission in life was to break down social barriers in health care, and she knew this public gesture would help.
Her research locating the study’s survivors and descendants landed them in a White House ceremony, where Americans saw them on national news accept the president’s tears, the nation’s recognition ― and its promise to do better.
Now, Harris and her line of work are living through history again.
For 34 years Harris worked at the CDC bridging the gaps in public health for marginalized populations like gay people and racial groups.
But when the current presidential administration took office, anything hinting of diversity, equity or inclusion was deemed a toxic overreach. Across the country, funding grants were revoked, departments were eliminated and workers lost their jobs, including at the CDC.
Harris’ Office of Minority Health and Health Equity was officially disbanded April 1, 2025, and employees were told to turn in their equipment. She was forced into early retirement, her benefits threatened.
On a personal level, she was traumatized by a chaotic personnel process and public harassment.
Between those dramatic bookends to her career, Harris witnessed tremendous progress.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, she helped show CDC leaders their default methods of encouraging vaccination needed to change, and she helped initiate a project that persuaded Black people to overcome their distrust of public health and get vaccinated, thereby saving lives.
For Harris, who suddenly finds herself on the other side of her career — and a pivotal era in the nation’s public health history ― that project defines her legacy.
“We made a difference, and the world was able to get up and get back out,” she said. “We were able to live once again.”
Historical precedent for distrust
There is a long history of racial discrimination in U.S. medicine that has led to a distrust of public health initiatives among Black populations. Data shows the health system’s mistaken assumptions about race still contribute to disparity in health care today.
Studies have shown that Black patients who need pain medication ― like kids in the ER for appendicitis ― don’t get it as often as white patients in similar situations. A 2016 study of 222 medical students found that more than a quarter of them believed Black skin is thicker than white, and mistaken beliefs like that correlated with a shorting of pain medication for Black patients in a theoretical scenario.
But if any one event is credited for destroying African Americans’ trust in the government health system, it is what the CDC calls the Untreated Syphilis Study of Tuskegee.
It’s a shocking story. From 1932 to 1972, a U.S. Public Health Service study withheld diagnosis and treatment from 400 Black men infected with syphilis so scientists could track the progression of the disease.
Beginning in the 1960s, whistleblower Ted Buxton, a Public Health Service employee, filed multiple internal complaints about the study. A CDC investigation was conducted, but the study continued until Buxton went to The Associated Press and the news exploded nationwide. A congressional hearing was held, the study was shut down, and new rules were adopted to protect study subjects.
But medical professionals, tests and algorithms continue to make race-based mistakes. It goes both ways, scientific studies find, from using race as a factor when it isn’t to assuming race isn’t a factor when it is.
For example, medical products have been approved that weren’t adequately tested on Black subjects, for whom they might function differently.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the fingertip devices that measure oxygenated blood became invaluable in treating patients. But the devices don’t read Black skin as well as white skin, a known flaw since 2007. According to a 2024 report, Johns Hopkins University said “these findings were largely ignored and even denied by both manufacturers and regulators” until racial reckonings during COVID-19 prompted regulators to do better.
In another example, until recently thousands of Black transplant candidates were artificially pushed down the waiting list for kidneys. The formula used to determine who needed a new kidney most mistakenly assumed Black patients weren’t as sick as white patients because of assumptions about why some Black people have higher levels of creatinine in their systems.
Only during the pandemic was the formula adjusted. In 2024, 14,000 Black patients were advanced on the transplant list.
Saving lives through partnerships
Those are the kinds of medical mistakes Harris has spent a lifetime trying to fix.
“I always wanted to know why we were sicker, despite coming from what people deemed middle class,” said Harris, a native of South Carolina.
Her mother died in childbirth, and she was raised by her paternal grandmother, who had a huge goiter on her neck that could have been fixed with iodized salt.
As soon as Harris could get her license, she was driving her family members to doctor appointments. In high school, she enrolled in a program that gave students the opportunity to work with hospital and health professionals.
Then it was the 1980s, and she noticed significant numbers of young men coming home to die from a disease that later became known as AIDS. She wanted to make sure they were treated with understanding.
She got her college and advanced degree in public health at the University of South Carolina, and went to work where she felt she could make the most impact connecting marginalized communities to health resources: the government. Within a few years she was employed by the CDC.
When the pandemic struck in 2020, Harris worked in the Office of Minority Health and Health Equity and was asked to help the emergency response team.
“We asked for her specifically,” said Dr. Ram Koppaka, who was associate director for adult and influenza immunization.
Three months into the pandemic, racial disparities among survivors became apparent. Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced that although Black residents made up about 30% of the city, they were making up about 70% of the COVID-19 deaths. In Georgia, advocates realized that in the majority of cases, race data wasn’t being collected.
Harris and her colleagues knew from experience that one of the most impactful ways to prevent sickness and death in marginalized communities was to build trust and foster a receptive attitude toward CDC’s evolving health directives.
“Whatever new thing it is, whatever change, it’s always to be expected, in an environment without universal health care, that we’re always going to have a very specific disparity, mainly focused on Black and brown people and people in rural America,” said Demetre Daskalakis, former director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the CDC. “It’s always the same.”
Harris and Koppaka knew the CDC wasn’t connecting with Black audiences and that the stakes would be even higher when vaccines became available.
Koppaka oversaw a listening session for CDC members and community leaders who delivered brutally honest feedback.
That session led to an unprecedented adult immunization initiative in CDC’s history. Called Partnering for Vaccine Equity, it distributed more than $260 million in grants to hundreds of partner organizations that spread the word or hosted vaccination clinics and cascaded those grants down to smaller organizations. The effort sent more than 200,000 trusted messengers into their communities holding information sessions, posting on social media and distributing educational materials.
Harris’ skills for reaching out to the community were invaluable.
Jacqui Burton leads the Conference of National Black Churches, a group of more than 30,000 congregations claiming around 20 million worshippers. When Harris first started calling from the CDC in late 2020 to lay the groundwork for Koppaka, Burton ignored the voicemails.
“I didn’t know her,” Burton explained. Harris kept calling, and her message finally landed: She wasn’t just asking for help. CDC wanted to partner on a funded grant that would pay churches and their members for their work.
“The CDC saved countless lives with this vaccine program,” Burton said.
The concept behind the program was based on the knowledge that the public needed to hear from “trusted partners” in their own communities. That could be a nurse, or a barber or a pastor. It wasn’t Dr. Anthony Fauci, former chief medical adviser to the president. Educational materials were branded by the local organizations or partners.
They chose not to use the CDC logo, Harris said. “At that time … we were not trusted agencies.”
Bishop J. Drew Sheard has never met Harris, but over those years he became a powerful advocate.
“Members were very skeptical,” Sheard said ― of the news coming out of the government and of the vaccine.
With the education and resources from the CDC, Sheard’s own church not only spread information about the disease and the vaccine but also held vaccination clinics where groceries were offered.
Cars lined up around the block. Minds changed.
“What (Harris) did was so important, to get with the Black church,” Sheard said. In his recollection, “No one in my congregation, and I pastor a pretty large congregation, died of COVID.”
Koppaka credits Harris with driving home the impact of this approach. Daskalakis confirmed that Harris “kept putting us in the right rooms with the right people to hear what the issues were, so that we could try to address them as best we could.”
In 2021, the CDC’s partner organizations administered 1.7 million COVID and flu vaccinations. Along with other organizations working toward the same goal, their efforts — combined with a growing distrust in the vaccine among white populations ― contributed to a marked narrowing of the national vaccination gap between Black and white adults. In May 2021, 14% more whites than Blacks had been vaccinated; by July 2022 the gap was 5%, according to the health research organization KFF.
Eliminating DEI has ripple effect
The federal government had finally enacted something that closed the gap in adult vaccination disparities.
The investment didn’t last.
Even before President Joe Biden’s administration left office, the Partnering for Vaccine Equity program was on the rocks.
“Heartbreaking doesn’t even start to begin to summarize how disheartening it is,” said Amy Parker Fiebelkorn, a veteran vaccination worker for the CDC who fought the pandemic as team lead for partnerships.
“To see the momentum we were building, and the trust that we were forming with partners who were new to public health, partners who were new to vaccination? And to hear some of the stories come out of these efforts about bridges being crossed and new understanding about people getting vaccinated who would not even have considered it prior? And to know that all of this work was being undone as the funding dried up? It’s hard to watch,” she said.
Then came the Trump administration. First her office was told to take “equity” out of the name, so they became the “Partnership” branch. Then, last April the entire branch was sent home on administrative leave.
“Several branches in that center that did what the administration thought was equity, or DEI work, were demolished. Erased,” Harris said.
Like many other CDC employees let go by Trump adviser Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, Harris’ separation was chaotic. There was no expression of gratitude for her service. After 34 years on the job, she was told she would get no retirement, no pension, no health insurance. When she fought back, there was often no human resources department to fight with, as most of those employees had been laid off, too. With legal help, she secured her retirement benefits, but they continue to glitch.
About a week after she was put on administrative leave, Harris’ dog started barking like crazy one day. She looked on her porch and saw 50 pizzas had been delivered. A colleague called and said Harris had been added to a DEI watch list compiled by a pro-Trump group, and she was among others who had been harassed with massive pizza deliveries. It was a way for malicious hackers to indicate they knew where people live.
Per protocol, she contacted the CDC Office of Safety and Security. “I’m afraid for my life, afraid to go out of the house,” she remembers telling them. “I can’t go to my doctor’s appointment. What can you do?” She says she never heard back.
As a target of DOGE, she felt crumbling solidarity among colleagues as some CDC workers were afraid to be in contact with her. “I was treated like I had the plague,” she said.
Harris was terrified. She had her son’s dog trained as an attack dog. She did something she never thought she’d do: She bought a gun.
“Why would someone put me, someone who’s so low down at CDC, on the front page of a DEI watch list?” Harris wondered.
When a gunman shot up the CDC building last August, a friend sent her a photo of the window where she used to sit. A glinting bullet hole was visible at head level.
“That was trauma,” she said.
Harris doesn’t know what to make of the CDC’s future. She doesn’t want it to fail. If it can be a force to make the world a better place, “I’m all for that.”
When queried by an AJC reporter about the Tuskegee study during an interview about the future of DEI, the CDC’s new policy guru, Principal Deputy Director Ralph Abraham, praised the Tuskegee Airmen, the famous World War II hero pilots.
He assured a confused reporter he knew it was a different group of people, but it was a good memory prompted by the word “Tuskegee.”
“It was wrong. We know that,” Abraham said. “But you know, that was way past, and it was unfortunate. If I could flip a switch and change it, absolutely, I would.
“You know, now we look forward. And we just don’t want to ever let something like that happen again.”
Recalling his own practice as a rural Louisiana doctor, Abraham, himself a vaccine skeptic, said: “I never saw any disparity in vaccination rates among any minorities as compared to any other age group, racial group, religious group. … I’ve never met anybody that wanted to be sick, and I’ve never met anybody that wanted to be poor.”
Where those barriers to access exist, he said, “that has nothing to do with DEI.”
This year’s AJC Black History Month series marks the 100th anniversary of the national observance of Black history and the 11th year the project has examined the role African Americans played in building Atlanta and shaping American culture. New installments will appear daily throughout February on ajc.com and uatl.com, as well as at ajc.com/news/atlanta-black-history.
About the Authors
Ariel Hart is a reporter on health care issues. She works on the AJC’s health team and has reported on subjects including the Voting Rights Act and transportation.
Tamar Hallerman is an award-winning senior reporter for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She covers the Fulton County election interference case and co-hosts the Breakdown podcast.
