\n<\/p>\n
It was a strange weekend for employees of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to say the least. On Friday, hundreds of workers at the agency, many of whom have been furloughed since the federal government shut down on October 1, found out they were being fired as part of widespread layoffs across federal agencies. Less than a day later, a curt follow-up email landed in many of their inboxes informing them that they weren\u2019t being let go after all. No explanation, no apology.<\/p>\n
Staffers spent the weekend trading calls and texts, trying to piece together who had been axed, who had been spared, and, most puzzling, why. \u201cThere\u2019s really no strategy that they\u2019re using, no real approach\u2014at least any thoughtful approach\u2014to how they are doing these cuts,\u201d Daniel Jernigan, who directed the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases before he resigned in August, told me.<\/p>\n
I spoke with a half dozen current and former CDC officials, and foremost on their mind was what they described as the ineptitude of the botched downsizing. For example, almost all editors of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, which the CDC has published since 1960, were among those notified on Friday night that their work was \u201cunnecessary or virtually identical to duties being performed elsewhere in the agency.\u201d By Saturday, several CDC sources told me, they had their jobs back.<\/p>\n
Andrew Nixon, the communications director for Health and Human Services, wrote in an email that \u201cthe employees who received incorrect notifications were never separated from the agency and have all been notified that they are not subject to the reduction in force.\u201d He declined to answer specific questions about layoffs.<\/p>\n
Many of the cuts that have<\/em> stuck so far seem to conflict with the administration\u2019s stated aims. A branch of the National Center for Health Statistics that coordinates\u00a0 an annual survey of the dietary habits of Americans\u2014a topic presumably of interest to those attempting to make America healthy again\u2014was eliminated, according to its former chief, David Woodwell. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has accused the agency\u2019s vaccine-advisory board of being \u201cplagued with persistent conflicts of interest\u201d and insisted that such conflicts must be eliminated in order to restore Americans\u2019 trust in the CDC. And yet, the agency\u2019s human-resources office\u2014which handled ethics issues\u2014has been scrapped, according to Alt CDC, a team of anonymous public health officials that has been crowdsourcing updates on the firings. \u201cI would think, if you are monitoring for conflicts of interest, particularly when you\u2019ve accused the agency of having them, you would want to have an office to do that,\u201d Debra Houry, who was the CDC\u2019s chief medical officer until she resigned in August, told me.<\/p>\n One veteran researcher who still has his job (and, like other public-health workers I spoke with for this story, requested anonymity for fear of losing it) told me he believes that Kennedy\u2019s ultimate goal is to \u201csilence the scientific voice of career CDC scientists.\u201d And indeed, perhaps the clearest result of the firings is that they appear to consolidate Kennedy\u2019s power over the agency. Every member of the CDC\u2019s Washington office, which serves as a conduit between the agency\u2019s Atlanta headquarters and Capitol Hill, was fired; barring a second round of reversals, that office appears to be closed. The person managing Alt CDC\u2019s Bluesky feed yesterday, who identified herself as an epidemiologist in a state health department, told me she\u2019d heard that CDC personnel who normally share information with state officials during outbreaks have been eliminated. \u201cSo the only contact they have is going to HHS\u2014is going to RFK,\u201d the epidemiologist told me.<\/p>\n For CDC scientists who received layoff notices, the past few days have been disorienting. I spoke with one longtime scientist at the agency who learned on Friday that she would lose her job but then, on Saturday, received an email with the subject line \u201cRescission of Previous Notice of Reduction in Force.\u201d In other words, her job\u2014deemed redundant the day before\u2014was again apparently necessary. She told me that her short-lived firing \u201cfelt like the culmination of eight months of abuse\u201d under the Trump administration. She was particularly distressed by Kennedy\u2019s June decision to fire the entire vaccine-advisory board and stack it with his allies, but recent months have offered even more opportunities for stress and indignation. In August, a gunman who blamed COVID vaccines for his depression opened fire on the agency\u2019s Atlanta campus, killing a police officer. (The veteran scientist told me she shopped online for a bulletproof vest to wear to work, though she ended up not buying one.) Weeks later, Kennedy pushed out the agency\u2019s newly confirmed director, Susan Monarez. Three top CDC officials\u2014Houry, Jernigan, and Demetre Daskalakis, the former director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases\u2014subsequently resigned in protest.<\/p>\n On Friday, hours before layoff notices went out, Jim O\u2019Neill, who took over as acting CDC director after Monarez\u2019s ouster, posted two photos on X of what appeared to be a bald eagle soaring over the Capitol building. His message: \u201cGood morning we are going to win.\u201d For the people I spoke with who remain at CDC, what exactly the acting director hopes to win\u2014and for whom\u2014isn\u2019t clear, in part because they haven\u2019t heard anything else from O\u2019Neill. On Friday, instead of discussing the growing turmoil at the agency he oversees, Kennedy posted on X congratulating President Trump for his new drug-pricing deal and defending comments he made at a recent Cabinet meeting linking autism with the use of Tylenol after circumcision. As of this evening, he still hadn\u2019t addressed the firing about-face.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It was a strange weekend for employees of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to say the least. On Friday, hundreds of workers at the agency, many of whom have been furloughed since the federal government shut down on October 1, found out they were being fired as part of widespread layoffs across federal<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":27844,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[11923,2780,16577],"class_list":{"0":"post-27843","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-cdcs","9":"tag-weekend","10":"tag-whiplash"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27843","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27843"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27843\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/27844"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27843"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27843"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27843"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}