Food safety staff among CDC employees caught up in firings and rehirings

A mass firing of more than 1,000 employees at the CDC is yet another sign that public health — including food safety — is not in the forefront of the Trump Administration’s mission, according to the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota.

The 1,000-plus employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were notified of their firings late on Friday night via email. About 700 of them were rehired Saturday morning with the Administration saying that a “coding error” had caused the problem.

Among the staff fired and rehired were 70 disease detectives in the Epidemic Intelligence Service who work on investigations of foodborne illness outbreaks. Also fired and rehired were the editors of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) and the entire Washington D.C. staff of the agency.

“The weekend whiplash has further damaged the CDC, which has already seen significant cuts since Robert F. Kennedy Jr. became HHS secretary. The agency has also been thrown into staffing turmoil after former director Susan Monarez, PhD, who held her position for less than a month, was fired after she clashed with Kennedy on vaccine policy,” according to CIDRAP. 

Monarez’s ouster led several top-level CDC staff to leave in solidarity, including Demetre Daskalakis, MD, who wrote on X over the weekend that the firing and rehiring at the CDC were a “lethal injection” to the agency.

“Think about what it’s like to be at CDC. It’s like living with an abusive partner that attacks and then takes back some of the abuse,” he wrote on X after the rehirings were announced. “That doesn’t make the partner less abusive. Sending strength to CDC staff held hostage.”

On Monday Tina Tan, MD, president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, in a statement decried the firings, saying food safety was among the worst impacts. 

“For nearly eight decades, CDC has worked around the clock to protect Americans from a growing range of health threats from rabies to food safety to Ebola,” Tan wrote. 

“The agency’s support of state and local health departments and health care professionals is the backbone of our nation’s public health response. . . Even prior to the latest round of layoffs, clinicians across the country reported dangerous interruptions in access to services including laboratory testing, public reporting and expert analyses of outbreak data and publication of clinical guidelines, all of which directly impact patient care.”

Rosa DeLauro, a U.S. representative from Connecticut and chair of the Congressional Food Safety Caucus said the firings hit at the heart of public health and food safety efforts at the CDC. 

“CDC’s disease surveillance plays a vital role in safeguarding public health. Without it, our collective safety is at risk. Among those receiving reduction-in-force (RIF) notices are members of the Epidemic Intelligence Service, our nation’s premier disease detectives, experts in chronic disease and global health, and staff who produce the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, CDC’s flagship publication that provides information about outbreaks to the public health and medical communities. In public health, you cannot have a go-it-alone approach, which is the tact this Administration is following.

“I will continue to fight for CDC and to protect the American people,” DeLauro said.

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