"We saw what happened with Susan," Debra Houry, CDC's former chief medical officer who resigned in protest of Kennedy's political interference, told Stat News. "She couldn't make staffing or policy decisions. What has changed? Kennedy hasn't changed."
The law outlines how actions brought by federal agencies must follow certain established procedures and be based in facts, as well as how upon challenge the courts could review and enforce those requirements on said agencies.
The 6-foot-7 inch Foege literally stood out in the field of public health. A whip-smart medical doctor with a calm demeanor, he had a canny knack for beating back infectious diseases. He was director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and later held other key leadership roles in campaigns against international health problems.
➡️ In our latest cover feature, Dr. Demetre Daskalakis talks to The Advocate about leaving the CDC under the Trump administration and calling out RFK Jr. "I feel bad for my people who are inside the CDC," he says. "The CDC is now a weapon. That is why I left. The weaponization of public health is happening, and I am not crying wolf."
On Monday the top public health body in the U.S. slashed the number of vaccines recommended for children. The move came just weeks after President Donald Trump ordered health officials to align the country's vaccine schedule with those of peer, developed countries. In practice, this means the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will no longer recommend shots to protect against 17 diseases; instead it will recommend vaccines against 11 illnesses.
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.
For instance, after Kennedy went rogue and removed the COVID vaccine from the immunization schedule for healthy kids and pregnant women, Vaccine Guy (Demetre Daskalakis, MD, MPH) persistently asked to see the data on which this decision was based. While he was told it was many pages of data, when he finally got the memo it was just 2 pages with no data.
Decades of progress in HIV treatment and preventionin the United Statesis being derailed by the Trump administration, public health experts say - and without reversing course, the damage will be devastating. Threats to key federal programs are unfolding just as science has significantly advanced how easily patients can treat and manage HIV - leaving experts deeply frustrated. The development of a vaccine, which researchers believed was closer than ever to becoming a reality, is now dead in its tracks.
Numbers are still sketchy, but reports from Friday indicate that more than 4,000 federal workers overall were initially targeted for layoffs. The Trump administration linked the firings to the ongoing government shutdown, which legal experts have suggested is illegal. Unions representing federal workers have already filed a lawsuit challenging the move. Of the reported 4,000 terminations, about 1,100 to 1,200 were among employees in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
In November 2022, the WHO decided to change the name. The United Nations health agency noted that it had received reports from individuals and countries about the "racist and stigmatizing language online, in other settings, and in some communities." The WHO decided to switch to the name "mpox" with a one-year grace period.
