The Guardian on Friday published devastating reporting about the state of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The headline: “Inside the CDC’s leadership vacuum: work at a ‘standstill’ and low morale as 80% of top posts remain vacant.” The well-sourced article describes CDC as “in a state of disarray.”
Among the newspaper’s findings:
- There is “no permanent leader to drive policies affecting the health of millions of Americans. No one is in place to coordinate the agency’s day-to-day work fighting infectious disease, combatting heart conditions or screening for cancer.”
- “Current and former senior CDC officials have told the Guardian that productivity has slowed to a crawl in some areas as a result of bureaucratic delays and backlogs in paperwork. The agency is flying blind after breaks in data collection in critical areas such as infant and maternal mortality.”
- Daniel Jernigan, the former director of CDC’s national center for emerging and zoonotic infectious diseases who resigned in August in protest of Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s “politicized approach to public health,” told the Guardian that if another pandemic were to emerge, “I fear the experience, leadership, and need for decisive action just won’t be there.”
- Since Sec. Kennedy’s appointment 14 months ago, “almost one in five CDC employees, at least 2,400, have been fired or have quit. An additional 300 staff members remain stripped of their duties on full pay, more than a year after they were placed on administrative leave.”
Read the Guardian’s full deep dive into the crisis at the CDC here.
