LISTEN: Current and former employees of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are angered by a recent decision by Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to upend an advisory committee that makes vaccine recommendations. GPB's Sofi Gratas reports.
Current and former employees of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are angered by a recent decision by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to upend an advisory committee that makes vaccine recommendations.
At a protest on Tuesday outside the CDC campus east of Atlanta, organizers pasted portraits of Kennedy, CDC Chief of Staff Matt Buzzelli, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, and Russell Vaught with the Office of Personnel Management onto a life-size cardboard cutout of the band ABBA.
“We're going put their faces on here and people can ask them questions," said Aryn Melton Backus, a CDC employee who was laid off during the reduction in force earlier this year and helps lead the Fired but Fighting movement. "No one in CDC will answer our questions.”
Transparency is one demand from protestors who stand out in front of this CDC campus along the main entrance every week.
Many also want a reversal of the mass layoffs across federal health agencies — the Department of Health and Human Services has lost thousands of staff since February. Ongoing court cases could decide if those layoffs were unconstitutional.
While they continue to fight for that, recent moves to further dismantle the CDC had protestors such as retired CDC worker Kathy Cavallaro feeling even more despair, she said in between rainstorms on Tuesday.
For over two decades, Cavallaro said she helped other countries in developing a system similar to the United States Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). That 17-member committee was gutted this week.
Cavallaro now fears that instead of the panel of trusted immunologists, pediatricians, epidemiologists and others, the new group will be made of people who don’t support vaccination efforts or are skeptical of vaccine efficacy.
“And it is simply embarrassing and heartbreaking to see what's happening,” she said. “Pediatricians and other doctors depend on the recommendations by this committee.”
As do public health clinics, where in every Georgia county, families can get vaccines for themselves and their kids.
Already cuts to the CDC have resulted in the halting of prevention activities by the Georgia Department of Public Health. Future cuts could do more damage, people argued on Tuesday.
Anna is an infectious disease doctor at the CDC. GPB agreed to only use her first name since she still works at the agency.
She said the firing of the committee members feels like part of a larger effort to undermine evidence-based methods of disease prevention.
“That's why we came out today, because we cannot stay silent in the face of these threats to the health of the American people,” she said. “We swore an oath to protect them.”
Last week CDC employees were asked to remove certain guidelines for COVID vaccines, leading to confusion and anger.
Anna said these days, when new directives come out from the federal government without internal review, employees are left scrambling.
“On the inside, the first thing that happens is chaos,” she said.
Employees were hoping to address their concerns at an all-staff meeting this week, which would have been the first since President Donald Trump took office. But according to an internal email sent to CDC employees from agency Chief of Staff Matt Buzzelli and reviewed by GPB, that meeting was rescheduled a day before it was supposed to happen.
