Half of CDC Epidemic Intelligence Service Laid Off
newrepublic.comThis, Kennedy, attacks on Obamacare: the 1% culling the herd ? Certainly the monied class will in any scenario retain access to decent, science-based health care.
The function of “healthcare” in the US is to separate families from their generational wealth at end of life. The way the system is set up all a persons assets will be used up and depleted paying for required care Medicare does not cover (in home or assisted living). Only when a person is destitute with all their assets depleted will Medicaid kick in.
The result is a transfer of wealth from individuals to the for profit health care industry. Only the wealthy have enough assets to survive this process to leave something to their heirs.
Additional comments,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43052910 ("CDC cuts expected to decimate Epidemic Intelligence Service (statnews.com)", 58 comments)
Cautionary tale: Be sure you omit several words from your next Federal grant.
Taxpayers are tightening their belt(s).
No they are not. They gave themselves 4trilion fucking tax breaks. It's veiled shitfoolery not tightening the belt.
The private health companies need to hire these folks en masse to a jointly owned company and provide a contract disease surveillance service to CDC. But they probably make more money if people get sick. The whole reason for public health spending right there.
What a fertile ground the US becomes for Russian and Chinese agencies testing bioweapons.
Ooh I love this conspiracy theory, but who needs bioweapons when Chinese labs will leak deadly viruses through sheer incompetence?
Especially if US funds those bioweapons.
Save taxpayers money too from reduction of redundancy.
:-/
Why are half of CDC epidemic intelligence staff hired in 2024?
It is a 2 year fellowship. Assuming hires are uniformly distributed, it would stand to reason that approximately half were hired in the within the past year.
https://www.cdc.gov/eis/php/participants/index.html
I would be interested in hearing arguments for why it is helpful to gut the CDC’s globally recognized applied epidemiology training program
Title is: RFK Jr. Just Kneecapped the CDC on His First Day
How is this related to Hacker News overall? No idea. People keep posting politics here with no reason.
Anyways, this is a good thing if you want to clean up the mess from very long time, regardless of the party.
I would be interested in hearing arguments for why it is helpful to gut the CDC’s globally recognized applied epidemiology training program
First of all, the way CDC works, it's just a board of directors from many pharmaceutical corporations. There are known conflicts of interest here.
Secondly, USA is considered a very unhealthy in comparison to Europe and other countries, while that's mosrly related to FDA, CDC also plays a role here by promoting drugs/vaccines in cases you only need a change of habits (like eating well to minimize flu severity)
Third, the way CDC dealt with COVID was unacceptable, their mixed messages about facemask, social distancing, herd immunity, reapiratory machines caused many people to die, and not because of the virus necessarily. This is a 15k people agency.
And worth to mention their controversy to require social media companies to censor posts about Wuhan Institute of Virology, when we all know today it was true, and CDC was partially responsible of the COVID 19 crisis. Also their censorship of scientists who disagreed with CDC conclusions, and some of them resulted to be factual.
After all of this, I do think it's fair to reform the CDC entirely. The economic impacts of their mistakes destroyed millions of business and caused many people unemployed. Even today 2025 you see few large companies struggling or going bankrupt because of their debt under COVID.
You may think we had to do that to prevent COVID spread, but all current data says the opposite, and many countries who never took hard measures had same or lower spread than US. CDC had to rectify all of their errors.
I have many friends who lost their jobs, VISA or green card process, because CDC was incompetent to act against a virus they previously knew, and recommended things they didn't encourage in the past (like paper/cloth masks to prevent spread of a viral virus).
This sounds like an unserious answer but I'll try to give you the benefit of the doubt.
> First of all, the way CDC works, it's just a board of directors from many pharmaceutical corporations.
Citation needed. This is very much as odds with what is described at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centers_for_Disease_Control_an...
> CDC also plays a role here by promoting drugs/vaccines in cases you only need a change of habits (like eating well to minimize flu severity)
What fields of medicine did you specialize in?
I find it puzzling that there are people out there like you who want to dismantle public health infrastructure when we have active outbreaks of measles, bird flu and who knows what else.
I'm all for improving and optimizing public health services (or all government services for that matter) but I don't understand this willingness to threaten people's safety. Does Google just take down their search engine when they want to merge in a PR?
You're pushing a conspiracy constructed in pursuit of a narrative.
No, the CDC did not knowingly assist in creating and spreading COVID to kill people across the globe. It caught everyone off guard and the world was woefully underprepared to handle such an event. A million Americans died and people still call the entire thing a hoax and demand blood from public officials like Fauci.
Maybe, just maybe, if people listened to the CDC and WHO we would have better outcomes. Maybe if we acted earlier, like was requested, we would have prevented it's spread. But I seem to recall a certain set of executive and legislative members doing everything they could to politicize and antagonize and encourage the use of ineffective dewormers.
And when we finally made a vaccine, those very people discouraged it's use to the extreme - conspiracies of microchips galore - and had public health officials getting death threats. But, no, it's the CDC's fault.
I won't even touch how utterly asinine the "just eat better and let everyone get the flu" comment is.
> You're pushing a conspiracy constructed in pursuit of a narrative.
I don't play conspiracies, I distrust everything proven, this includes conspiracy theories with arguments made from air.
I haven't said that was intentional. I blame their errors and mistakes.
> Maybe, just maybe, if people listened to the CDC and WHO we would have better outcomes.
When? They changed their narrative almost 6 times, while killing people with the mechanical respirators or keeping them stuck in-home with no physical activity.
The world already faced this kind of acts during the Spanish Flu, and CDC repeated the exact same mistakes of that time, considering we have better technology and information by that time.
The Wuhan lab research and blame to Chinese people was a conspiracy during COVID, and today we know how CDC was involved into the gain-of-function Wuhan Institute of Virology. Why did they negated everything when questioned?
Do you understand many Chinese people faced discrimination because of this? And this was well known project funded by the NIH.
> I distrust everything proven
So a conspirationist? got it