A Trump Siege at the C.D.C. and Atlanta’s ‘Global Health Capital’

The cluster of medical facilities in the city around Emory University and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention carry prestige. They feel under attack.

The picketers who gathered along Clifton Road in Atlanta on Tuesday, just outside the guarded gates of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, had chosen familiar ground for protesters furious over issues ranging from animal research to vaccines.

But Tuesday’s demonstration was unusual: Hundreds of people had gathered to champion the jobs of public health workers, days after the C.D.C. began cutting about 10 percent of its work force.

Outside of the Washington, D.C., area, few places are at higher risk from the Trump administration’s budgetary ax than Atlanta’s concentrated medical corridor, east of downtown, where the C.D.C., Emory University and its scientific research empire, and a large Veterans Affairs hospital practically bump up against each other. Billions of dollars flow through the campuses each year, helping to employ thousands of people.

But at risk is more than jobs and dollars. It is stature. A city that has long prided itself on business acumen and a sacred role in the civil rights movement has also cherished the status conferred on it by its centrality to public health and medical science.

“Atlanta really has seen itself as a global health capital of the world — at worst, one of several global health capitals,” said Dr. Mark Rosenberg, a former C.D.C. official who was the president of the Atlanta-based nonprofit Task Force for Global Health.

Now, the potential weakening of the nation’s public health system threatens to hollow out Atlanta’s influence. And for a place like Atlanta, where it is common to see someone with C.D.C. ties in the preschool pickup line, at church or at the hair salon, the cuts are tearing at a generations-long bastion of shared prestige.