#cdc

#cdc

➡️ 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."

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.

So, if we're headed now in a direction where we can't trust these agencies as they're being dismantled and, you know, we have these reports that by next month there is going to be some kind of report that attempts to tie vaccines to autism, for example, and stuff that isn't actually based in science, who should Americans then rely on for health guidance?

While sitting at his desktop, Tapper searched the CDC website for the word abortion under the CDC's Ten Great Public Health Advancements. And you'll see, none of them include the word abortion,' he said. There's another one, also, just to be fair, Tapper continued. Here's another Ten Great Public Health Achievements,' United States, a different one. When Tapper typed in abortion, the search came up zero out of zero.