An HIV expert at the CDC was asked to scrub data on trans people. He quit instead. - LGBTQ Nation

"Early one morning in April, John Weiser checked his email, worried that a colleague at the Division of HIV Prevention at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) was on the list for another round of firings. That's when he found his own termination notice. Weiser, a 14-year CDC veteran who ran the agency's Medical Monitoring Project, a surveillance system that's the sole source of nationally representative data on people with HIV, had been suffering along with everyone else at the health agency due to Elon Musk's DOGE cuts."

""We were ordered to send five bullet points each week describing our accomplishments during the previous week or face termination," Weiser wrote in an essay published in The Journal of Infectious Diseases. "Management provided careful guidance about how to craft the five bullets to satisfy the AI model that would presumably be reading them from over a million civilian government employees. But I knew giving in to this absurdity would only lead to more bullying."

""So, I declined to submit my bullet points." It was the first among a number of decisions Weiser made at the CDC that would test his fidelity to science and oath to do no harm. Weiser started his medical career at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, when he "consoled the newly diagnosed and sat with the dying," as he put it."

John Weiser, a 14-year CDC veteran who led the Medical Monitoring Project (MMP), lost his job amid broad workforce cuts. He refused management's order to submit weekly five-line accomplishment bullet points crafted to satisfy an AI reviewer and viewed the requirement as bullying. The MMP supplies the only nationally representative surveillance data on people with HIV and helps reveal disparities affecting marginalized groups, including transgender people. Weiser began his medical career during the 1980s AIDS epidemic and emphasized an oath to do no harm. Policy changes under the Trump administration removed recognition of transgender identity at the CDC, threatening data and protections.

Read at LGBTQ Nation