A protest Tuesday at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention over budget cuts tipped over into calls by health workers for Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to resign, after Kennedy, the evening before, fired all members of a key vaccine advisory board to the CDC.
“I am here today to tell you that the secretary ... has shown himself to be a domestic health threat,” said Dr. Anna Yousaf, a pediatric infectious disease specialist. She said she works at the CDC but was speaking for herself personally.
“With the firing of the (vaccine) experts, how can we assure the health of all Americans, in particular women, people with disabilities and racial and ethnic minorities, will be protected?” echoed a message relayed through a loudspeaker by Abby Tighe, a fired CDC employee and organizer of the rally. “Robert F. Kennedy Jr. must resign.”
Tighe read several messages that she said were from current CDC employees in the building across the street, or working remotely, who asked to stay anonymous and were afraid for their jobs.
In addition, several people who walked over from the CDC building were holding a large American flag and said they were employees but did not want to be identified. They spoke in person at the rally against what they said was the undermining of science.
“I want you guys to think about what that means,” Tighe told the crowd. “People who work for the public are scared to speak to the public.”
The rally teemed with homemade signs supporting science, CDC workers and their mission. It also featured mock-ups of Trump administration figures like Stephen Miller and Office of Management and Budget director and Project 2025 co-author Russell Vought.
On the edges floated a fully robed figure of the angel of death, wearing a plague mask and bearing a sign with virus death tallies and a plea for vaccines.
Some speakers, such as Kathleen Ethier, did not mention Kennedy’s resignation and said that didn’t mean they supported his choices.
“This is not a reorganization,” said Ethier, former director of the CDC’s division of adolescent and school health. “This is destruction.”
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Ever since Trump and Elon Musk began stopping CDC work and firing employees this spring, alumni and supporters have been appearing every Tuesday to support the agency and cheer the remaining workers as they leave for the day.
But this week’s gathering burgeoned into a rally with between 50 and 100 attendees, including elected officials. It followed the Friday release of the Trump administration’s proposed budget that would reorganize federal health work.
Experts who analyzed the documents said that while Kennedy means to create a new office, the “Administration for a Healthy America,” and move some CDC work over to the new department, the two together will, in many important cases, do less and have fewer resources.
According to an analysis by the health publication STAT, some of the most surprising cuts include efforts in chronic disease prevention, a known Kennedy priority.
Long-standing funding lines at the CDC for tobacco control, nutrition and obesity, school health, heart disease and stroke, diabetes, and cancer prevention and control are among those that are zeroed out and slated for elimination in the new agency’s first budget justification for Congress, STAT wrote.
Others decimated include funding for HIV prevention and injury prevention. That includes preventing drowning by kids and falls by the elderly.
Yousuf cited work on maternal and infant health monitoring and worker safety that had been gutted.
“These programs impact and protect all Americans,” she said. “He claims he is moving much of this work to a new organization, but that hasn’t happened. And he has fired nearly all the federal experts working in these fields.”
Credit: Ariel Hart
Credit: Ariel Hart
Dr. Barbara Marston, a former CDC infectious disease leader and Decatur physician, pointed to HIV cuts as an example of a strategy that didn’t make sense. It leaves in place work on high-risk areas while eliminating the larger base of foundational work that goes on around it. But one can’t be sustained without the other, she said.
“There’s just no way that you can carry out the degree of HIV prevention that was happening at CDC with a 75% cut in budget,” Marston said.
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