Dr. Demetre Daskalakis: “The silencing and downsizing of CDC means that we’re not prepared for daily public health as well as for emergencies.”
Today, two former senior leaders at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases Director Demetre Daskalakis and Chief Medical Officer Debra Houry — both of whom resigned in protest after the baseless firing of CDC Director Susan Monarez, participated in a press call hosted by Defend America Action to discuss how HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is using the government shutdown to gut the CDC to further his own pseudo-science agenda, putting the health of the American people at risk,
“If a member of Congress would like to contact the CDC, they don’t have a person to call to get a perspective from subject matter experts, which leaves us in the situation where CDC scientists are being held hostage by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who wants his voice to be the only one, and that voice is one that is full of ideology rather than science,” said Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, former National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases Director. “If a critical function was cut, CDC will move other people to fill that critical function, which means the dominoes fall and that function will no longer be tended to. The silencing and downsizing of CDC means that we’re not prepared for daily public health as well as for emergencies.”
“On Friday night, approximately 1,300 people were fired. Some were rescinded over the weekend, about 700, but that’s still 600 additional staff that were terminated, and when you look at what was eliminated, it’s concerning how the agency is going to function. This is now the third series of cuts to CDC among their staff, leaving CDC less prepared to protect all of us,” said Dr. Debra Houry, former Chief Medical Officer. “What we saw this weekend was a complete lack of strategy. A lot of the public attention around some of the programs that were lost and brought back was because there was lack of strategy and a public outcry around the impact this was going to have.”
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KEY FACTS
- Trump and Kennedy initially fired off layoff notices for between 1,100 and 1,200 employees at the Department of Health & Human Services. This caused mass chaos at the agency, and shortly after the initial layoff notices went out, HHS officials quickly reversed more than half of the layoffs for staffers at the CDC.
- Trump and Kennedy’s firings threaten national security. They sent layoff notices to:
- Analysts responsible for monitoring and protecting the U.S. from biological, chemical and nuclear threats.
- Biodefense staffers with top-secret security clearance at the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response.
- Hundreds of federal employees working on mental health services, disease outbreaks and disaster preparedness, every employee working on a critical national study of health and nutrition that undergirds most public health research, and the team providing mental health support and security for CDC staff just months after the deadly shooting in Atlanta.
- Trump made it clear the mass layoff was politically motivated, and said his firings were designed to target so-called “Democrat programs.”