The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is in turmoil following the ouster of the agency’s director, a series of high-profile resignations, and an attack on its headquarters that killed a police officer, said former CDC staff Tuesday.
The former employees, including ex-deputy director for program and science and Chief Medical Officer Dr. Deb Houry and former director of the National Center for Emerging Zoonotic and Infectious Diseases Dr. Dan Jernigan — who both resigned Thursday — described the current environment at the CDC as a “death” where science is currently being sidelined by political ideology. Houry and Jernigan joined Georgia House and Senate Democrats at the State Capitol Tuesday to discuss the current climate at the CDC.
“You can almost see this as death by a thousand cuts: we’re cutting staff, we’re cutting resources, we’re undercutting science,” said Jernigan.
Jernigan said during a roundtable discussion before talking to the press that there has been an overall lack of transparency between the Trump administration and the CDC, saying that he has seen a shift in the CDC’s operations. Whereas past administrations, regardless of their political leanings, worked with scientists to let data guide policy, Jernigan said the current approach appears to start with a predetermined ideology and then attempts to find scientific justification to support it.
“I recognize you really can’t get politics completely out of public health. [Public health is] really a priority here. What are you putting first? And we’re asking that science go first before the policy development, and not starting with an ideology and then backing into the science,” Jernigan said.
The former CDC employees also tied the current political climate to the recent shooting at the CDC campus, which they said was fueled by years of misinformation about vaccines. Abby Tighe, who was fired from the CDC in May and is a founding member of Fired But Fighting, a coalition of terminated CDC employees and allies, said it’s “tragic to not have a stronger condemnation of this act of violence” and warned that without officials speaking out against the attack, she fears attacks on the scientific community could continue to happen.
“That could look like more attacks, and with the vaccine misinformation being the driver for this, who’s to say that this won’t lead to attacks at pediatricians’ offices or pharmacies or all of these places where vaccines are given and professionals who work in the vaccine space exist,” Tighe said.
CDC employees on Thursday were told they have to return to the office by Sept. 15, according to an email obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, just over a month after nearly 200 rounds of ammunition hit six separate CDC buildings. The building is still being repaired, but Lynda Chapman, chief operating officer who sent the notice, stated in the letter that an “alternative on-campus space” will be provided to those whose office “remains impacted.”
Houry said she left the agency because she “could no longer fight on the inside.” She expressed deep concern over decisions that she said were not being made based on data and science, as well as the loss of talented staff. She said that while she was tasked with sunsetting certain programs during her time, she did her best to archive data so that it could be “resuscitate[d]” if funding is restored.
“If there’s a surveillance system that doesn’t have funding or people, we cannot produce that data. But as we were facing sunsetting a lot of those programs, [we] did what we could to preserve it because we are hopeful that at some point we’ll be able to rebuild our agency,” Houry said.
