Weekend chaos at the CDC

This weekend was one for the books—though by now, it’s starting to feel like business as usual. Late-night firings. Mass confusion. Then a partial reversal. CDC has become a real-time experiment in how quickly a public health system can be dismantled before anyone realizes what’s been lost. Spoiler: the administration noticed. Sort of.

Meanwhile, bird flu is back, and with federal data updates frozen by the shutdown, we’re piecing together a disease “weather report” from Google Trends and good intentions.

We conclude with a poll and a glimmer of hope: depression rates among young people are falling, and public health scientists have just been awarded a few “genius grants” to advance the field.

This is The Dose. Let’s go!

Weekend at CDC: What we know, what we don’t know, and the real danger

On Friday, about 1,300 CDC employees received a surprising email: they were fired. No warning. No time to plan. Their badges were immediately deactivated. The justification was a “reduction in force”—a bureaucratic term now being used as a political pawn in the broader Congressional shutdown fight.

This wasn’t the first wave. For months, CDC employees have endured mass layoffs, political interference, the firing of top scientific leaders, a lack of transparency, and fear and uncertainty. But this round struck at the agency’s core. Senior leaders, including the incident manager for the national measles response, were let go. The entire MMWR team—the scientific backbone that translates CDC data into outbreak reports and public guidance—gone. So were epidemic intelligence service officers, the nation’s “disease detectives” who detect and track emerging threats before they spread.

It didn’t stop there. Cuts hit every corner of CDC’s operations:

• Data office: the infrastructure that collects, connects, and analyzes data nationwide.

• CFA INFORM: the “weather service” for infectious diseases.

• CDC Washington Office: the bridge between science and policy.

• Global Health Center: the front line that stops diseases abroad before they reach U.S. shores.

• Chronic Disease Policy and Comms: connecting science to action on diabetes and heart disease.

• Injury Prevention Policy and Comms: addressing gun violence, opioid overdoses, and suicide.

• Ethics teams, human resources, the CDC library (it’s hard to do science without access to scientific literature), and more.

Then came the whiplash. Within 24 hours, 700 employees were reinstated. The administration called it a “coding error.” Maybe. Or maybe it was a scramble to reverse a catastrophic mistake. It’s hard to know precisely ...