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THE CDC DIASPORA FIGHTS BACK  
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Jonathan Cohn
October 22, 2025
The xxxxxx
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_ How America’s scientific army is trying to stand up for public
health—and stand up for itself. _

Rally in support of ousted leaders of the CDC, credit: screen grab

 

_Atlanta, Georgia_
THE SCIENTISTS GATHERING INSIDE a cavernous convention hall here this
week weren’t chanting or carrying protest signs or wearing frog
costumes. But over the course of four days, they engaged in what felt
like their own brand of political resistance.

They were there for IDWeek, the annual gathering of professional
societies that work on infectious diseases. And in many ways the
meeting was like any other medical conference. Participants attended
mostly narrow, technical lectures on topics like tuberculosis, HIV,
and tropical diseases—one session had the title of “Big Beasts of
Clinical Mycology”—with occasional breaks for networking at
receptions and strolling among the vendors in the exhibit hall.

But the meeting at the Georgia World Congress Center, which goes four
stories down into the side of the hill, so that riding the escalators
down was a bit like entering a concrete bunker. And that felt fitting,
given the circumstances.

This was the first IDWeek gathering of Donald Trump’s second
presidency, meaning it was the first since Robert F. Kennedy
Jr.—Trump’s Health and Human Services Secretary—launched his
assault on federal public health institutions. That includes the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, whose Atlanta headquarters
are just a few miles away and where there are still bullet dimples in
the walls from the August assault by a gunman angry
[[link removed]] about COVID-19
vaccines.

The difference was impossible to miss, attendees told me, and it
started with who was there—or, more accurately, who was not.

CDC staff traditionally attend IDWeek in large numbers, to present and
to learn—and to make connections for future collaborations,
including in a potential crisis. A year ago, when the Atlanta location
for this year’s meeting was announced, everybody assumed CDC
attendance would be higher than usual because it would be almost
literally down the street.

But no CDC staff were present in their official capacity this week.
The immediate reason was the federal shutdown, which includes
government-wide rules forbidding conduct of most normal business. But
several former officials who were at the meeting told me the
agency’s new political leaders had made clear long before the
shutdown that they would be dramatically limiting attendance and
presentations.

HHS officials did not confirm that, or (yet again) respond to my
queries for this article. But scaling back CDC participation in the
conference would be consistent with Kennedy’s contempt both for
expertise and for experts—and with the way he has treated the CDC
more generally, through a series of cuts, firings, and forced
resignations that have effectively wiped out whole divisions.

One reason I came to Atlanta this week was to get a better sense of
just how big a toll Kennedy’s actions had taken. The answers I got
were not exactly encouraging. The attendees I met (along with some CDC
veterans I reached separately) painted a picture of an agency that is
struggling to carry out some basic operations, and in which scientists
are subject to a level of political control that goes well beyond
anything in CDC history.

In the aftermath of this devastation, however, something quite unique
to the scientific community has arisen: a coordinated effort to step
into the void the CDC is leaving, as a source of information the
public can trust. Nobody thinks these efforts can come close to making
up for what the CDC is no longer doing. But there was a discernible
sense that the effort itself has value—that by taking action the
scientists were making clear not only their determination to call out
the administration’s attacks, but to do something about it.

THE FIRST STEP in pushing back against the administration has been to
catalogue the damage it has done. But that is proving a difficult
task, because HHS has not published detailed lists of who’s gone and
who’s left—or how many have departed. Making things even more
difficult is the ambiguous status of many employees, since pending
lawsuits have blocked some layoffs and a number of people are on
forced administrative leave, being paid but not actually at work or
doing their jobs.

And all of that is separate from the government shutdown, which has
most of the agency’s workers on furlough.

The best estimates come from crowdsourcing efforts by former
employees. Acting through existing or new groups, they’ve combined
what they’re hearing from old colleagues along with information from
unions. And based on that, it looks like the CDC has effectively lost
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a fourth and a third of the roughly 12,000 people who were working
there as of January, according to Barbara Marston, who retired from
the CDC in 2022 and is coordinating a network of former staff.

These losses are scattered across the agency, IDWeek attendees told
me—sometimes in ways that reflect obvious ideological motives, like
the shuttering or hollowing out of offices that deal with equity or
LGBTQ issues, but sometimes in ways that don’t appear to have any
particular logic other than an imperative to cut staffing levels.

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“I’d describe the CDC as Swiss cheese, with holes throughout it,
or maybe Jenga, where you’ve built it up and then taken out a whole
bunch of blocks,” Abigail Tighe
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founding member of a group of former CDC employees called the National
Public Health Coalition, told me. “We are not tipping over yet, but
we are very close, in a couple of different ways.”

Another way to think about the cuts and their effects is to think
about the types of personnel who have been lost. And one
underappreciated category, attendees told me, were staff in
departments like human resources or accounting whose positions might
have looked ancillary or less essential to Trump administration budget
cutters, but whose day-to-day work is essential for an agency that has
to award and manage grants—or dispatch personnel to work with cities
and states.

And then there are the changes at the very top.

JIM O’NEILL, THE ACTING CDC DIRECTOR who took over
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Kennedy forced out Susan Monarez, is believed to be the first
non-scientist to head up the agency, even on a temporary basis. But
more disturbing to some of the attendees I met was the fact that the
other senior members of the agency director’s office—typically
about ten in all—appear to be mostly or all political appointees,
rather than career officials, as in the past.

“When I was in the CDC Office of the Director, there was one
political appointee—and that was the director,” Kathleen Ethier
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twenty-six-year CDC veteran who left in January, told me. “Now I
think—I can’t verify the number—but I think it’s about ten. As
best as I can tell, there is no one in a leadership position at CDC
who is not a political appointee.”

The attendees I met said it’s a clear sign of how science is now
being driven by political agendas in ways that go well beyond anything
they’ve seen before.

One example, as pointed out to me by several at the conference, was
new language on the CDC website
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reduction,” a strategy that seeks to minimize ill effects of
substance abuse (like the spread of bloodborne disease through dirty
needles) without necessarily curbing drug-taking behavior.

The new language characterizes harm reduction as “efforts that only
facilitate illegal drug use and its attendant harm”—a description
consistent with longstanding beliefs many conservatives hold but
inconsistent with a large body of research
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harm reduction can improve health
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lives
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leading to greater drug use or discouraging treatment. Programs based
on harm reduction, the site says, will be “deprioritize.”1
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Of course, it is on vaccines where the politicization of science has
been most visible, thanks in part to Kennedy’s purging of the
official advisory committee that makes immunization recommendations to
the CDC director. And this is where outside scientists have most
clearly taken the initiative.

On Sunday, they even made a little news.

It came from epidemiologist Michael Osterholm, who, along with former
CDC director Rochelle Walensky
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heading up the Vaccine Integrity Project
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initiative, backed by several foundations, to provide trusted
information about vaccines both to the public at large and to
scientists who have traditionally relied on the CDC’s analysis of
data to guide their decision-making.

To carry out the latter effort, the Vaccine Integrity Project has
spent the past few months conducting what is basically a giant
literature review of published evidence on the efficacy and safety of
reliable vaccines. During Sunday’s opening session, in a
conversation on the main stage, Osterholm announced the review was
complete and under consideration at the _New England Journal of
Medicine_—where, he said, he hoped it would get quick approval.

This would be a big deal, given the number of medical societies and
states that have said they will be making their own vaccine
recommendations because they can no longer rely on the CDC. To make
those recommendations, these states and societies need reliable
analysis of the underlying research. If the Vaccine Integrity
Project’s analysis gets the imprimatur of a publication as widely
respected as the _New England Journal_, states and medical societies
will be able to trust it.

“We’re not trying to be an ACIP in the shadows, we can’t do
that,” Osterholm, coauthor of a new book on pandemics called _The
Big One
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told me. “But we said we need this scientific information out there,
so that other people and organizations can make sound judgments and
recommendations, and took it upon ourselves to do that.”

The effort that went into the analysis is impressive: A team of
scientists started with abstracts of more than 17,000 academic
references, then began whittling down the papers to the most relevant
and reliable—subjecting each smaller group to more scrutiny—until
finally they had about 500 to study carefully, and present as a new
evidence base.

Originally, Walensky told me, they approached about eight researchers
to do the work. It ultimately took about twenty-five, she said, all
working on their own time.

“People were doing this outside of their day job, just to get the
data out there,” said Walensky, an infectious disease specialist now
back at Harvard Medical School after having led the CDC for two and a
half years under President Biden. “So many people were like, ‘I
don’t know what to do, but I’m feeling at this moment like I need
to help the country.’ And so while we were all working these
ridiculous hours, I think we all felt like we were doing something
important.”

THE VACCINE INTEGRITY PROJECT is just one of several likeminded
efforts—from groups like the National Public Health Coalition, which
originally called itself “Fired but Fighting
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outside organizations like the Center for Science and the Public
Interest [[link removed]], which has started producing a blog
called “The Straight Shot
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that provides updates and fact-checks on changes to federal vaccine
policy.

And then there is CDC Alumni and Friends
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which had been operating as a more casual social and civic
organization until this year. Now it’s a full-blown activist group
that—in addition to holding press conferences and helping
crowdsource information about personnel—has led rallies outside CDC
headquarters, in order to show solidarity with the workers still
inside.

“Every Tuesday afternoon they would be standing outside, forty or
fifty of them, while everybody was getting fired—everything was
being destroyed—and they were just out there, saying we love you,
you do good work,” Fiona Havers
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a top agency expert on vaccines who left in June, told me. “It
really meant a lot.”

Nobody thinks these efforts can come close to filling all the gaps
left by the cuts at the CDC. And none of the attendees I met thought
rebuilding trust with skeptical members of the public would be easy.
They remained concerned about how their startup initiatives could
reach people who get information through TikTok and Facebook, not CNN
or the _New York Times_, especially when competing against the bully
pulpit enjoyed by Kennedy and his legions of MAHA influencers.

OSTERHOLM’S CONVERSATION was the final part of the opening plenary.
It followed what was the emotional high point of opening day—and
maybe the whole event—when infectious disease specialist Demetre
Daskalakis received an award.

The award was for his years of work on HIV. But the standing ovation
he got was for his high-profile resignation from a senior CDC post
after Kennedy’s firing of Monarez—and the high-profile commentary
he’s given since (including here at 
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xxxxxx
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about the threats Kennedy’s changes pose to public health.

Daskalakis used his acceptance speech to fire up the crowd, urging
attendees to follow his example and use their voices—as individuals,
as practitioners, and as parts of a larger organization—to make the
case for scientifically sound practices and for agencies like the CDC
that, whatever their flaws, do essential work.

Advocacy isn’t as strange for infectious-disease specialists as it
might be for some other scientific disciplines. That’s especially
true for those who got their start back in the 1980s, fighting for
AIDS patients at a time when the president wouldn’t even say the
name of the disease.

But this time it’s the scientists—and their science—under
assault. That’s new. It requires a level of engagement that goes
beyond anything this community has done before. And at the end of the
day, they are still doctors and researchers, more at ease fighting
microbes than a political movement.

Two days after Daskalakis got his award and spoke, with the conference
more than half over, I asked him how he thought the meeting compared
to past versions—and what kind of mood he was detecting from the
attendees.

“I think everyone is still experiencing shock and awe from all of
the things that are happening to public health,” he said. “But I
feel like people know that we’re in it for the long haul. And they
know it’s not going to be an easy long haul, or a good long
haul—that people’s careers are gonna be affected and people’s
lives are gonna be affected—but that we can come out the other side
with something that’s more resilient.”

Jonathan Cohn [[link removed]] is a writer at The
xxxxxx, author of Sick (2007) and The Ten Year War (2021) 

_You may have noticed that sh*t has gotten weird the last few years.
The xxxxxx [[link removed]] was founded to provide
analysis and reporting in defense of America’s liberal democracy.
That’s it. That’s the mission. The xxxxxx was founded in 2019 by
Sarah Longwell, Charlie Sykes, and Bill Kristol._

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