Ex-CDC official: "Pure chaos" at HHS

And this happened to be just a day after the secretary had finished his confirmation hearings. Why?

We were told that there was a concern it could hurt the secretary's confirmation, that if vaccine-related information was missing from the website, that it could reflect poorly on him. Specifically, information about vaccines. Yes. Because why? There was a concern that the secretary had expressed anti-vaccine sentiments, and that if CDC, as he was coming on board, didn't have information on vaccines on the website that it had to do with his hearing and his direction. So all of these have been taken down because you're trying to comply with what the president wanted. Correct. But then, realizing it might hurt votes to confirm the secretary, you had to scramble and put some of them back up. That's our understanding and to be very clear--

Sounds very confusing. --when we took the websites down, we flagged that many of these websites contained information such as that. I don't think they understood the volume or the impact until media and others started noticing all the websites that were gone. During the secretary's confirmation hearing, he said all decisions would be free of political influence and guided by science. Yes. But you received an email from his chief of staff telling you of, quote, "absolute need for political review of major decisions at the CDC." How different is that from typical management? That has never happened before. Usually, certainly, there would be political review of high-level decisions, but not every decision. And scientists, careers, would be at the table. I can tell you through my eight months, when I was the transition lead and the only career in the Office of the Director, I was not part of most of the conversations with the political appointees at HHS. And did most of those political appointees have medical degrees? I don't think any. And HHS at that time had medical degrees. We had one person at CDC who was a political appointee, who had a medical degree. He didn't come for the first few months. And in the Office of the Director, we had no one with a medical background or even a public health background. So the decisions being made were by individuals who had no medical background? No medical background, and not only no medical background, no science background, and for many of them, no background in government. And I want to be clear, it's certainly OK to have different perspectives and different expertise. But then you want to make sure that the scientists and experts are also being heard and part of those decisions, and we weren't. Back in 2024, 2025, this was a really intense flu season, the worst in more than 15 years. Nearly 300 kids died. At that time, HHS had this awareness campaign called Wild to Mild.

Yes.

And it encouraged everyone, it said, six months and older to get a flu shot. So one day after Secretary Kennedy is sworn in, there are then a flurry of emails saying this is a direct request, that was the language used, from the secretary to pull down all of those ads. Why? I first thought, there's a misunderstanding. Children are dying. It's an active flu season, it's not like flu is over, and we'd already paid for these ads, so it didn't make any sense. And so I brought it to our political leaders and brought it back to our communications staff and asked them to please relay back to the Department, surely, this isn't what you want. And then we got a note back. It's a direct request from the secretary. A growing number of states, 29 plus DC, have announced they're no longer following CDC recommendations as a benchmark for childhood vaccines. This is too much. Do you think that public health and faith in public health can be restored? I think the secretary has caused a lot of irreparable harm. And when you look at many of the polls out there, the trust in public health, specifically CDC, has decreased dramatically, over 20 points in many polls. That's really difficult to recover from. And when states are removing links to the CDC website and following other medical organizations, I don't know how you build back that trust overnight. Autism and finding out more about it is a real focus for the secretary. Before, when he was running for president himself, he put this at the top of his agenda, as well. A lot of families are looking to him with a lot of hope. Do you trust what is being conducted in terms of research into autism? Absolutely not. And that's unfortunate because autism is a significant issue in our country and worldwide. But there's not a single answer to it. We know that 40% to 60% is linked to some sort of genetic etiology. There's environmental factors. There's probably infectious disease factors. So you need to really have a robust field of study around autism versus again, looking at a single question. And what we saw was back in February and March, we were asked to look at autism. And we proposed several different ideas, including a large study looking at autism and working with NIH. And what came back to us was, no, we want to look at the vaccine safety data link data for autism. So narrowing in on vaccines and autism versus what we had proposed. And even more concerning is when my staff reached out to NIH scientists who did autism work, they weren't aware that the NIH acting director and some of the other NIH politicals had reached out to us about looking at vaccine and autism and CDC data. How is that possible? I guess, there wasn't communication between the NIH politicals and the NIH experts on autism, and after that, there was no more communication between our scientists on autism and NIH scientists on autism around that topic. The Kennedy aides did not trust the professionals within the CDC and the NIH. Is that fair? I'd say that's fair. In your emails, there's one from the director of the National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities, and she said they're looking into how to respond to questions about vaccine safety and autism. And that's when you said, not until we're asked, and don't go so narrow. What ever happened to that? Was there ever a CDC study launched? No. Well, not on what I had proposed. What I had proposed back to that center director was that autism was an important thing to study, and we should be looking broader and working with NIH. What came back instead was that NIH, the acting director, as well as a contractor, John Powers, who's now an NIH Institute acting director, were going to look at the vaccine safety data with a lens towards autism. Back in April, the secretary held a press conference on what he called the autism epidemic. And he claimed that the media has an ideology of epidemic denial, that we are not asking enough questions about why there is an uptick. You wrote in one of your documents here that there was a bit of concern that you heard after the secretary spoke. What concerns were you hearing? Even President Trump's first surgeon general, Jerome Adams, put out on social media about how the secretary really focused on profound autism and not really looking at the whole spectrum of autism and-- Not looking at highly functional. Yeah, and just really demeaning, in my mind, anybody with autism versus recognizing the struggle that individuals and families have and how we could support them. And he really kind of misrepresented the data, like conflating information on states, when a lot of it had to do with detection. And if we had been able to brief him, like I had suggested, since it was a CDC paper, we could have walked through that with him. Like what the statistical analysis meant, what some of these findings meant, but we weren't given that opportunity. And there was backlash from many in the autism community, including groups like Autism Speaks, because of how the secretary spoke about autism. And again, autism is impacting so many families in our nation. We need to look at it seriously and not with a conspiracy lens like the secretary is doing. You say a conspiracy lens. The secretary from the podium said-- Somebody made a profit by putting that environmental toxin into our air, our water, our medicines, our food. And it's to their benefit to say, oh, to normalize it, to say, oh, this is all normal, it's always been here. You believe he had already concluded this, and that's what you were hearing. It was also that in my emails, you'll see that he has requested data from 30-plus years ago from studies that have been replicated, that Congress has found that there was no wrongdoing on, because he was convinced that CDC was hiding information on autism and vaccines. Again, if we want to do studies looking at all of autism and vaccines as a component of it, maybe that's OK. But looking at studies from 30 years ago that have really been litigated over and over, that's a waste of taxpayer money and really, in my mind, a disservice to families that want to know what is causing autism in their children and how can you treat it. But he seemed to believe that there was a cover-up--

Yes. --within the CDC. Yes. And he had written about that in many of his books, as well. When I was transition lead, I prepared for his arrival by reading many of his books and taking notes, and had really looked at what were some of the falsehoods in those books and tried, hopefully, to have a discussion with him around what we had found in data. But that didn't happen. In all of these documents, there also seems to be a theme here of the political leadership being completely out of sync with the medical professionals, and also disconnected from the Trump administration's DOGE cuts.

Yes. One of the secretaries aides is emailing, asking why data crunching hadn't been done for weeks. And you explained the chief data officer and so many people on the IT team had just been laid off.

Yes. Did they not know about the RIFs and the layoffs? It seems we had to really emphasize that at multiple points. Once I got asked around a firefighter program and what was operating plan to make sure that program was still in place, and I explained, we don't have one. They've all been laid off. You can't replace firefighters with an infectious disease specialist when they've been laid off. So similarly, when I got asked, why is this taking so long? I said, our chief data officer, our chief information officer, and the head of our forecasting group, were all part of the group that was RIF, a Reduction in Force, or transfer to the Indian Health Service, or put on administrative leave. These cuts, when you lose 30% of your workforce, and over time, we ended up losing about 80% of our senior leaders, had a dramatic impact on the functioning of the agency. We've reached out to both HHS and the White House for comment and have not heard back. We'll be back in a moment.

I want to know what's going.