Recently confirmed Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is reportedly laying off nearly half of the public health workforce, which handles responding to emergencies like the measles outbreak unfolding in Texas.
Employees at the Epidemic Intelligence Service, a vaunted training program run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, are among the nearly 1,300 health workers being terminated. The EIS focuses on investigating disease outbreaks both domestically and internationally.
“This will destroy the EIS, which is one of the absolute crown jewels of global public health,” Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, told State news.
Along with firings at the National Institutes of Health, Politico estimates that RFK Jr., DOGE Chair Elon Musk, and President Donald Trump have targeted at least 3,600 federal health workers in a downsizing effort of administrative infrastructure. Most of these initial HHS firings are of workers with the CDC and NIH.
“This is absolutely tragic,” one CDC employee told NPR. “If we lose these people, we lose important capacity and in a very real sense we lose our CDC future.”
“The country is less safe,” former top-ranking CDC official Anne Schuchat told CBS. “These are the deployable assets critical for investigating new threats, from anthrax to Zika.”
Meanwhile, Texas is experiencing one of its worst measles outbreaks in decades. The number of confirmed cases, which started in the state’s under-vaccinated Gaines County, has routinely doubled—reaching 48 on Friday.
The Houston Chronicle reports that Texas health officials fear that 200 to 300 people have already been infected.
“HHS is following the Administration’s guidance and taking action to support the President’s broader efforts to restructure and streamline the federal government. This is to ensure that HHS better serves the American people at the highest and most efficient standard,” HHS Communications Director Andrew Nixon said in a statement To NPR.
The dismantling of public health under the Trump administration continues as the United States also faces an ongoing avian flu outbreak, affecting livestock across the country and resulting in egg shortages and skyrocketing prices.
But don’t worry, without a public health or disease control apparatus, Trump’s team has a solution: “A better, smarter, perimeter.”
On Sunday, Kevin Hassett, Trump’s former chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, told CBS News’ “Face the Nation” that “what we need to do is have better ways with bio-security and medication and so on to make sure that the perimeter doesn’t have to kill the chickens. To have a better, smarter, perimeter … they’re killing chickens to stop the spread, but chickens don’t really fly.”
Hassett, who referred to Americans as “our human capital stock” during the height of the coronavirus pandemic, blamed the Biden administration for killing chickens infected with the avian flu.
His fix for public health issues seems to be creating a magic “perimeter” while killing all of the wild ducks and geese in the United States. Between that and RFK Jr.’s mass public health layoffs, what could possibly go wrong?
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