Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the leader of the Department of Health and Human Services, also oversees the C.D.C., the nation’s public health institute. He doesn’t like it much. He’s called it “the most corrupt agency at H.H.S. and maybe the government” and has vigorously defended mass firings that Elon Musk’s DOGE carried out there. At least 18 percent of the C.D.C. staff has been pushed out since January 2025.
Kennedy has said that the C.D.C. — which is made up of more than 20 centers focused on a wide range of public health issues, including infectious diseases, food-borne illness, substance abuse and violence prevention — is too big to be effective. He’s pointed to the agency’s difficulties during the coronavirus pandemic: “We literally did worse than any country in the world,” he said at a Senate hearing in September, “and the people at C.D.C. who oversaw that process, who put masks on our children, who closed our schools, are the people who will be leaving.”
My colleague Jeneen Interlandi interviewed more than 40 people who work or worked at the C.D.C. They described an agency in turmoil. Here’s some of what she learned.
Were statements trustworthy?
Early on, the Trump administration told agency staff that political appointees would review all public communications before they went out. In many cases, it left scientists unable to communicate with outside researchers or public health groups. Susan A. Wang, a former immunization adviser in the C.D.C., said:
We had a very stringent scientific process for vetting information that would get published on the C.D.C. website. Everything was checked and double-checked. And for political appointees to take over the means of communication is devastating, and also dangerous. Now, some things are correct and some are not, which means that you can’t trust any of it.
Dubious measles remedies
After a child in Texas died of the measles, the health secretary downplayed the outbreak as “not unusual” in cabinet meetings and television appearances, even though it was the largest since the disease was declared eliminated in the United States in 2000. Demetre C. Daskalakis, the former director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said:
Even as the outbreak grew, R.F.K. was still just praising the doctors who were giving snake-oil treatments like budesonide, a corticosteroid, and clarithromycin, an antibiotic, to kids with measles and saying how they saved hundreds of lives, which was absolute garbage. We were asked to add those treatments to the measles guidelines. We managed to mitigate that by including the words on the guidelines but saying that none of these were proven. Giving people the wrong medicines delayed lots of care for lots of kids.
Vaccine experts out, compatriots in
Kennedy has replaced members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, who set the C.D.C.’s vaccine recommendations. The newcomers have less expertise but share his views on vaccination. They’ve changed vaccine recommendations for flu, hepatitis B, measles, mumps, rubella and varicella. When Fiona Havers, a former medical epidemiologist in the respiratory viruses division, found out about the appointments, she recalled thinking:
I guess my career at C.D.C. is done. I didn’t want to be part of any machine that they were going to use to spread false information about vaccines or to take vaccines away.
This month, a federal judge temporarily halted Kennedy’s reconstitution of the A.C.I.P. and the changes he made to the childhood vaccine schedule. He said the health secretary’s changes were “arbitrary and capricious.”
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