To the Editor — On 1 April 2022, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) moved to close a sorry chapter in the organization’s history by terminating the inhumane immigration policy known colloquially as Title 421. The original order, issued on 20 March 2020, invoked a rarely used provision of US health law — section 265 of US Code Title 42 — allowing the US federal government, on the grounds of public health, to immediately turn away and expel people arriving at the border seeking asylum protection2. The order was then revised and renewed multiple times over two years by the CDC under both the Trump and Biden administrations. The public health justification for Title 42 was spurious at its inception and at odds with the science on SARS-CoV-2 transmission and infection. In allowing public health to be weaponized and used as a means to subvert the internationally recognized right to seek asylum, the CDC established a disturbing global precedent that undermined trust in public health institutions at precisely the moment when the world needed that trust most.