MORGANTOWN — About 40 people gathered this week to protest federally mandated cuts to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health facility in Morgantown. 

At least 185 researchers and other employees received reduction-in-force notices early last week as part of a larger push by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to dismiss 10,000 federal employees. On April 1, workers at NIOSH in Morgantown were instructed to leave the facility, even though the RIF notices indicated an end to employment in June. 

NIOSH’s Morgantown operations began with black lung research, and has expanded to include the Health Effects Laboratory Division and testing of personal protective equipment, among other areas. 

Other NIOSH workers in Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and Spokane, Wash., also are being furloughed.

Bill Lindsley hasn’t had time to catch his breath since he got his reduction-in-force letter last Tuesday informing him his job is going away — and his work involves breathing.

He’s a bioengineer who received acclaim across the country during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic for his research.

Lindsley and his team designed and created a fleet of robotic-like diagnostic devices that could “breathe” and “cough” particulate matter in close quarters, simulating tight workplaces made suddenly different by the-then looming shadow of the coronavirus.

The idea was to test out respirators, air filters and other preventive measures of that ilk that suddenly become even more important when everyone is falling ill.

The research is ongoing, but on June 2, it stops, along with Lindsley’s employment.. 

In this case, the right-sizing is being done the wrong way, Lindsley said, as he and about 40 of his colleagues who got the same letter stood along W.Va. 705, just down the road from the NIOSH building here, to protest.

That’s because the next COVID is on the way, he said. It may be in the form of avian influenza, or bird flu, which is already making its presence known, the researcher mused. Or another yet-to-be-discovered contagion could be percolating somewhere, waiting for an airborne opportunity.

“The clock is ticking,” he said, raising to make himself heard over a cacophony of car horns honking in solidarity. “We just don’t know what time it is.”

It’s long been too late for many coal miners across West Virginia and Appalachia, NIOSH epidemiologist Scott Lacey said.

Lacey worries about what might be the ultimate fate of those miners suffering from black lung, he said. 

He came to NIOSH and Morgantown 16 years ago specifically to tend to that segment of the workplace. When he and his team department in June, he’s fearful that all those preventative measures guaranteed by the Mine Safety Act will go away, as well.

“It means coal miners won’t be able to get regular chest X-rays that are mandated by the act,” he said. “It means we won’t be able to detect black lung early.”

Scientist Cammie Chaumont Menendez deals with social malady that might not always be associated with NIOSH: How to prevent violence in the workplace and among gig workers.

That’s not all the researcher does, she said — but it’s a lot of what she does.

“We’re the reason for security cameras in taxi cabs,” he said.

Keeping a keen eye out for people who go to work every day is precisely what NIOSH does, said Cathy Tinney-Zara, a NIOSH public health analyst president of Local 3430 of the American Federation of Government Employees — the union representing the bulk of the targeted researchers and other employees.

Tinney-Zara wants the jobs to be reinstated, she said, because they need to be reinstated.

“You go into public health because it’s a calling,” she said. “That’s what these people do,” she said, gesturing at the assemblage along the highway.

That sentiment was reflected in a sign carried by one of the researchers: “Oh, my gosh – you’re going to miss NIOSH,” it read.