{"id":78859,"date":"2025-10-16T17:26:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-16T17:26:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/78859\/"},"modified":"2025-10-16T17:26:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-16T17:26:07","slug":"2025-government-shutdown-the-cdc-layoffs-and-their-public-health-impact-explained","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/78859\/","title":{"rendered":"2025 government shutdown: The CDC layoffs and their public health impact, explained"},"content":{"rendered":"

After the Trump administration laid off hundreds of health workers<\/a> during the ongoing government shutdown, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has now lost one-third of its staff this year<\/a>. States are forming public health alliances<\/a> in direct opposition to the changes being made by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Only half of Americans say<\/a> they trust the CDC to deliver reliable information about vaccinations.<\/p>\n

The consequences of the CDC\u2019s gutting will be diffuse, given the agency\u2019s many different functions, and they could take some time to materialize. Public health trends are measured in decades, not in months.<\/p>\n

But to get a sense of where the agency stands after the chaos of the past year, I went to somebody who knows the place inside and out. Dr. Tom Frieden, the president and CEO of Resolve to Save Lives, a nonprofit global health organization, was CDC director from 2009 to 2017 under President Barack Obama. Our conversation is below, edited for clarity and length.<\/p>\n

Which specific CDC functions do you worry about the most? What hasn\u2019t gotten enough attention?<\/p>\n

You start with: We\u2019re losing our basic ability to know what\u2019s happening. That\u2019s really dangerous. Flying blind is a really bad strategy, whether you\u2019re piloting an airplane or trying to avoid cancer and infectious diseases. Our systems track what\u2019s happening and see whether the programs that we want to implement to save lives are actually working or not, so that we can then either fix them or continue them.<\/p>\n

Then there are the specific actions that are being taken that are very damaging, such as dismantling the Office of Smoking and Health, which has led US efforts that have dramatically reduced smoking in the US and continue to track what\u2019s happening in populations. The FDA tracks the product; the CDC tracks what happens in people and supports comprehensive action in communities and quit lines and hard-hitting ads. That\u2019s all gone.<\/p>\n

So, although I think much of what is said is laudable, what is done is the opposite of what is said.<\/p>\n

As a reporter who cites the CDC\u2019s survey data a lot, I\u2019m concerned about the layoffs in that office<\/a>. What are the potential consequences if that data isn\u2019t available or reliable?<\/p>\n

This is a really complicated survey. It\u2019s really hard to do. I know that particularly well because when I was New York City health commissioner, we did the first-ever community-specific health and nutrition examination surveys.<\/p>\n

It was massively difficult. It takes incredibly rigorous work to get comparable data and a representative sample and competent lab work. It\u2019s like building battleships, kind of. And once you stop building them, it\u2019s really hard to start again.<\/p>\n

This is our most ground-level truth of what\u2019s really happening. These surveys<\/a> tell you how we\u2019re really doing, and that may indicate what needs to be done differently. It\u2019s also the way we know what\u2019s happening with PFAS<\/a> and how many people have exposure to these chemicals in our blood, and whether we\u2019ll be able to reduce that with actions that this administration says they want to take.<\/p>\n

What should people think about these state public health alliances<\/a> or states issuing their own vaccination guidance? How do they decide which authority to listen to?<\/p>\n

What\u2019s the alternative? People have life-and-death decisions that still need to get made.<\/p>\n

You have a CDC that has been basically taken over by ideologues. This has never happened before. You have political appointees running the agency, setting policy on social media, making statements that show that they have very little understanding of or respect for basic scientific method, evidence, and facts.<\/p>\n

A lot of people had already lost trust in the CDC. Now, more people are losing trust<\/a> for very different reasons. How will the CDC ever regain trust \u2014 or is it becoming obsolete?<\/p>\n

It starts with listening carefully to what people are hearing, what they believe, and addressing valid concerns because the Make America Healthy Again movement gains power by real concerns people have: What\u2019s in my food? What\u2019s in my water? Who is involved in making these recommendations? Those are perfectly valid questions.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, with what\u2019s being done is in the name of reducing conflict of interest, you\u2019re seeing a big increase in conflict of interest. That\u2019s really clear in the autism discussion. They want to make autism a compensable condition under the Vaccine Injury Compensation Fund<\/a>. This is payday for trial lawyers while using the people who are dealing with autism and giving them false hope and false information about vaccines, which are repeatedly shown not to have been associated with autism.<\/p>\n

I think also public health needs to have tangible wins, things that it does that people can see and understand that this made their life better. This made my life healthier, safer. Our kids are about seven times less likely to smoke than they were a generation ago. Even with vaping, tobacco use is dramatically lower than it was a generation ago. The average lead level a generation or two ago would today result in urgent investigation. These are invisible wins.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not to say that either those problems are adequately addressed or there aren\u2019t other serious problems. We haven\u2019t dealt effectively with obesity. We haven\u2019t dealt effectively with asthma. We haven\u2019t dealt effectively among adults with hypertension, cardiovascular disease. We\u2019ve had 10 or 15 years of stalled progress. I think past progress shows both what\u2019s possible and what\u2019s needed. But any mandates or requirements also need to be kept to an absolute minimum.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t see public health becoming obsolete because facts are stubborn things. Even if they\u2019re denied and suppressed and misused and misquoted and cherry-picked, facts are still facts. The plain truth is that most people want to be healthy and safe, and what\u2019s being done now is putting that very much at risk.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After the Trump administration laid off hundreds of health workers during the ongoing government shutdown, the Centers for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":78860,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[55341,163,1541,521,85,46,4555,546,13265],"class_list":["post-78859","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-explained-newsletter","tag-health","tag-health-care","tag-healthcare","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-policy","tag-public-health","tag-today"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78859","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78859"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78859\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/78860"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78859"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78859"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78859"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}