Conversation

Dr. Catharine Young, a senior fellow at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, described the layoffs as a “Friday night massacre”
and warned of severe repercussions for both US citizens and the entire world.
“This isn’t streamlining the government
—it’s dismantling our ability to detect and respond to outbreaks before they spread,”
she wrote in a post on X. “You can’t cut your way to safety.”

Dr. Angela Rasmussen, a US-born virologist who works at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, wrote that
the CDC “is being eviscerated right now” and painted a dire picture of what that means for public health.
“America is not going to have any kind of outbreak response capacity after tonight,” she explained on Bluesky.
“Americans’ health data is no longer secure. Say goodbye to federal public health in any capacity.
It’s a disaster. We won’t recover.”

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a physician and politician who is running to be the Democratic nominee for the US Senate in Michigan,
said that the layoffs made it much more likely that deadly diseases such as the ebola virus would spread unchecked.
“10 years ago, Ebola ravaged through Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone
—it made landfall here,” he wrote on X.
“Ebola is spreading in the Democratic Republic of Congo right now.
What stands between us and Ebola if it keeps spreading?
The folks at CDC who [President Donald] Trump and [Office of Management and Budget Director Russell] Vought are using this shutdown to eliminate.
Dumb shit.”

https://www.commondreams.org/news/cdc-mass-layoffs