WASHINGTON — Centers for Disease Control and Prevention staff behind the agency’s flagship publication have suffered deep cuts as part of the firings the Health and Human Services Department has blamed on the government shutdown, according to five people familiar with the situation.
Almost the entire staff of Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, known as the “voice of the CDC,” has been laid off, former publication editor-in-chief Charlotte Kent told STAT Saturday in her first public interview since she left the agency in February. Four other people with familiarity with the cuts also confirmed that MMWR staff had been axed.
The firings are part of broader mass terminations on Friday by the Trump administration, which said it would lay off federal workers from “Democrat” programs, in the president’s words, as the shutdown, which Trump has blamed on party members, drags on.
An administration source, speaking anonymously so they could speak freely, told STAT that the publication is not gone, but Kent said the cuts leave MMWR essentially unable to publish.
“What it really means is it is impossible to rapidly disseminate public health science for action,” Kent said. “That would be critical if there’s a public health emergency. One of its main goals is to get information out as quickly as possible to help local and state officials respond.”
‘It’s a massacre’: CDC battered by government shutdown firings
The weekly report, which publishes research mostly by CDC scientists, has been on pause since the government shutdown began on Oct. 1. Other components of the report, which include supplemental and longer-form reports, have also been slowed.
Richard Besser, president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and former acting director of the CDC, said in a statement Saturday that the firings “will leave health officials and communities in the dark on infectious disease threats and developments on issues ranging from vaccination to maternal mortality.”
Prior to the shutdown, MMWR has faced other changes brought about by the Trump administration: When President Trump first took office, the publication had a lapse in its regular publishing schedule for the first time in its history, Kent said, amid a communications freeze. Kent also said there was pressure by administration officials to change the way the reports portray information.
MMWR has published some of the most consequential public health notices in recent history, including what would turn out to be the first report of AIDS as well as initial reports of the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic. It also published a research paper on how authorities tracked lead poisoning in applesauce pouches in 2023. It also was the first to report that Covid-19 could be transmitted asymptomatically.
“Those sorts of things have huge policy implications,” Kent said.
“What’s happening with cancer? What’s happening with coronary heart disease? We don’t have the mechanisms to describe that. It’s very concerning,” she added.
Helen Branswell contributed reporting.
