‘Zombified’ CDC, staff cuts and oversight issues under Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
So fuc*ing infuriating and sad. The CDC used to be the crown jewel of the world's scientific firmament. Other countries came to us for help fighting deadly diseases. Its disease detectives learned what caused illness and helped change practices to prevent them. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/26/h...
Politics and Health 🗳️ 🩺116Along comes #RFKJr and his anti-science, anti-vaccine, anti-anyone smarter than him attitude, and many of the brilliant minds have left. Especially grotesque: the staff of the chronic disease unit--didn't he say he wanted to study chronic diseases?--is half what it was.
Liberal Libbie18This is a HUGE nail in all of our coffins !
RockCandyMtns14Fucking republicans. Useless mfers living on our dime. WORSE than useless criminal filth. On purpose.
dabxdee.bsky.social13The real welfare queens and terrorists are not coming from other countries, they're right on Capitol Hill, holding office, wearing robes and badges, and running multi billion dollar corporations. All on your dime. Your oppression is their profession. pathological psychopaths.
Politics and Health 🗳️ 🩺12Why in God's name are these people not in prison? bsky.app/profile/gavi...
jhaygood12Weird this post was right above for me... bsky.app/profile/hist...
Jonathan Howard51These people got what they wanted. No one can say the threat was hidden. It was ignored and disbelieved.
Catincognito skeeting since 07/3/20239It's be design Not an accident Killing innocent children and old ppl...is their goal
Sister of Wendy #AbolishICE 🐸3Gutting our public health infrastructure serves to purge our country of "useless eaters," as Hitler once said. And that's their ultimate goal. It's yet another gift to billionaires who are no longer satisfied with stealing our last penny, they want our dying breath, as well. 🤬 #VoteBlue #SheShed
Dr. Sparklefairy3It's going to take decades to recover if we ever do
midnucas 🇵🇷2Objectively notion that the USA’s CDC was a world leader should have been shattered by their handling of the COVID-19 pandemic under both Trump and Biden , but people who write threads like these don’t give a damn about facts
Connie2The moment the CDC caved to airline CEOs to reduce Covid isolation protocols, it was the beginning of the end. Both Democrats and Republicans played a part.
I’ve been reporting on the CDC for years, and have written about many of its troubles over the past year. I was still shocked by the extent of the staff losses and political interference I found when reporting this one. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/26/h...
Apoorva Mandavilli145I talked to nearly 30 current and former CDC employees. The agency is no longer the independent beacon of public health it once was, they told me. Nothing — from bathroom cleanup to Ebola response — is working the way it should.
Randall Gates30You can’t enact a great culling of the population through diseases if you have a competent CDC able to prevent it.
Matthew Budman, book guy23RFK Jr. rejects the notion of public health—he believes that more people, not fewer, should be dying—and he is living that philosophy by killing humanity's flagship health agency. His boss, who agrees that people with "good genes" are destined to rule, is just fine with the CDC dying on his watch.
RainOrShine9917Thank you for your reporting and for posting here on BlueSky. I listen to the Osterholm Update Podcast (CIDRAP) and their reporting is also very horrifying and deeply saddening re: CDC and the entire national abrogation of duty to the nation from the top of the administration. Heartbreaking.
Okay, so about that…11This is in project 2025 Trump is a Russian asset His goal is to destroy America’s Crown Jewels - from national parks to CDC to higher ed etc CDC was a beacon of pride for the world until Trump touched it with COVID response hampering and DOGE cuts
quackerz.bsky.social8We're already in deep trouble right now, but if we don't become a blue tsunami in November it's all over for democracy. I'll never forgive the Republicans for standing around just watching instead stopping Trump.
Brian Lyman430A 48% drop in employees at National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. Yikes.
Don Moynihan280“Imagine losing a third of a city’s firefighters and then wondering why downtown is burning.” Connecting the dots between cuts and public sector failures is often difficult, but we are seeing the damage in public health. The only category of employee growing at CDC are political appointees.
It's ME(Jaime)69We watched CDC staff be ousted or suddenly decide it was time for retirement; provisional employees were fired en masse last year, and in some cases, trainings have been frozen so no one new can fully engage. CDC has been a ghost ship this year. Thanks to Apoorva for her reporting on this.
Prof Gavin Yamey MD MPH60I’ve been genuinely shocked by how rapidly & how extensively RFK Jr & Jay Bhattacharya dismantled the CDC It will take a generation or more to repair it & restore it to its former glory—pre-MAGA/MAHA, it was revered & seen as one of the finest public health agencies in the world Great reporting 👇
@NewsJennifer (Jennifer Schulze)52“Imagine losing a third of a city’s firefighters and then wondering why downtown is burning” This is excellent reporting on the destruction of the CDC. Kennedy is every bit as horrible & dangerous as you think he is, maybe even worse.
The Alternate Historian29There was a global pandemic. Something that hadn't happen in almost 100 years. America's response to it was to make sure we would never be ready to face another one ever again.
John Wiswell13This is what they've done.
babs ✨8it’s so awesome that on the one hand this is happening but on the other it is very cool discourse to make fun of people trying their hardest not to get sick(:
Alyson Smith7In less than 3 minutes, @apoorvanyt.bsky.social shows - and tells - us what’s happened inside the CDC. Everyone needs to watch ❤️🩹
Carrie Brown6This is horrifying. "One senior official said it felt as though the agency was being held together with bubble gum and duct tape, with employees running from crisis to crisis, and nothing working the way it is supposed to."
The CDC has lost nearly a third of its staff since RFK Jr took over, down to 6,683 people while measles spreads at home and Ebola abroad. Entire divisions gutted, teams on child abuse and sexual violence prevention included. This is dismantling public health from the inside.
JazzComposer3A satiric poem: Brainworm crawling up the nose What it eats no one knows Missing brain explains his woes Ear to ear the wind now flows Measles used to be quite rare Now we have to be aware Old diseases are everywhere Public health in disrepair Lessons from our past Lost very fast
deadblondewalking1This regime wants all the poors to die; this is part of that effort.
Ruth Zakarin18It will never cease to amaze me that the people who support this administration don’t understand that this hurts them too.
MrZ2Intentional ,to make us weak ,sick , suffering ,unable to do anything but try to survive .
GrammaBarb2It’s pretty obvious- The rich want the peasants to just die. Doesn’t really matter how- they’ve got all those resources buttoned up so that SOMETHING will take us out.
