America’s CDC crisis imperils domestic, international public health
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), America’s Cabinet-level, executive, national public health agency, which once prided itself on conducting science-based, data-driven analysis of pathogens and diseases, has fallen victim to crass politicization from President Donald Trump’s administration. Scientific inquiry in the CDC is being replaced with brazen political interference and regression on subjects such as vaccine policy-making. Evidence suggests that this move amid domestic and strategic blunders by the Trump administration has endangered both domestic and international populations.
Before the meddling, the CDC was recognized for addressing public health issues through statistical methods of inference, data collection, data set interpretation, scientific reasoning and preventive measures to combat infectious diseases. The firing of its former director, Susan Monarez, by Trump on Aug. 27, along with a slew of similar measures, has eroded its credibility. Note that Trump’s pick for U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), Robert F. Kennedy Jr., also banned COVID-19 jabs, which, alongside vaccine policy reversals and degradation of scientific methods of inquiry, resulted in a mass exodus of senior CDC staff. Trump’s head of the HHS is also a long-time vaccine skeptic, a disseminator of misinformation regarding diseases, and a conspiracy theorist who controversially promoted vaccine hesitancy in Samoa and Tonga amid a measles outbreak in both countries.
Then comes Trump’s appointment of Jim O’Neill, a non-medical professional, science and technology investor, and former critic of the Food and Drug Administration. These decisions clearly demonstrate that addressing public health and diseases through rationality and data-driven science is no longer a priority for the U.S. government.
As Leana Wen for The Washington Post further states, such political moves elevate skeptics instead of scientists, damage domestic public health infrastructure, or delay and prevent the provision of vaccines to patients. Such moves also lack strategic thinking, as they are taking place amid the American health sector, which has been facing severe financial pressures since 2019. These include constrained reimbursement growth and increased subscribers of two U.S. government insurance programs, Medicare and Medicaid, as documented by McKinsey and Company. Adding to this is the American public’s confrontation with deliberate date manipulation, a lack of disease surveillance, monitoring, transparency, or preemptive measures, which could impact their lives. A physician from Colorado, Denver, for example, stated that the CDC’s inability to carry out tests would direly affect patient care for the average American citizen.
Such politicization is not surprising. Such moves are the standard modus operandi for the Trump administration, following a long list of unilateral, draconian measures adopted to upend the health of both the domestic and world economy. Take the withdrawal from the World Health Organization (WHO) in January 2025, for example. This move, as detailed by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in 2025, inevitably impacts child deaths and morbidity, which are slated to increase globally due to American funding freezes.
Other steps are having a similar impact. A Lancet study conducted in June 2025 underlines the effect of Trump’s suspension of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (PEPFAR) by claiming that this could have otherwise prevented 14 million deaths by 2030 and 2.93 million HIV-related deaths globally.
Domestically, the CDC crisis will be felt in various ways. Plans to lay off employees in the federal Department of Health and Human Services will add to higher unemployment rates in the U.S., which, amid diseases such as measles, the fentanyl pandemic and bird flu, affects both practitioners and victims alike. Additionally, the removal of nearly 1,300 datasets on important subjects, such as gender identity and the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), will likely dampen trust in the American public, as questions regarding lack of transparency and accountability remain unresolved.
Trump’s aversion to institutionalism is also evident in his multilateral approach to solving some of the world’s most pressing problems, including tracking of pathogens such as Ebola and yellow fever, which has resulted in the impending destruction of the world’s health care system. Bloomberg reports that the cutting of U.S. funding for the Gremlin Network, which monitors the incidence of pathogens worldwide and provides reliable, credible information to inform policy discourses in different countries, has now prevented the issuance of early warning systems and disease preparedness, all due to the pre-Trump U.S. initial program of providing $8 million a year being withdrawn.
International implications are not limited to the Gremlin Network alone. Due to Trump’s interference, CDC officials have also been ordered not to collaborate with the WHO, which imperils prospective technical cooperation on global diseases such as Marburg, monkeypox and bird flu. Also, the pausing of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), which is the flagship journal of the CDC, has been paused by the Trump administration which has resulted in lack of international information on subjects such as pregnant people given that 3,000 CDC webpages have been removed on subjects such as STIs, HIVs or altered under directives targeting diversity and inclusion content.
In volatile times, such measures need to be contrasted with conventional wisdom, which is missing in the U.S. What is needed is adherence to institutional best practices, lasting health care investments from ruling governments, as is the case with China’s CPC, and coordinated governance, which makes more countries adept at catering to the needs of the afflicted and diseased.
Trump’s CDC crisis, however, has completely imperiled domestic and public health.
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