Bird Flu Looms as Trump’s Mass Firings Unleash Chaos at Public Health Agencies

The United States is experiencing the peak of one of the worst flu seasons in years. COVID-19 infection rates are also elevated in many parts of the country, and officials in Canada and the U.S. are stockpiling a new vaccine to protect farmworkers from bird flu as the outbreak, which caused the price of eggs to skyrocket, intensifies in the dairy and poultry industries.

We have a snapshot of such health threats thanks to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). But the CDC is one of the federal health agencies thrown into chaos by a flurry of mass firings this week as President Donald Trump and his allies attempt to stretch the limits of executive power by gutting the civil service, leaving the future of those reports on health threats uncertain.

Despite troubling headlines about disease outbreaks and pushback from the medical community, Trump and his newly confirmed health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., have moved quickly since Friday to terminate thousands of highly trained employees at the CDC and other Health and Human Services (HHS) agencies tasked with protecting public health.

Most job losses are among probationary employees — which can include employees who are newer hires or were recently promoted to different positions, as well as those on two-year assignments — who have fewer protections than tenured federal employees. But the CDC recruits long-term talent through programs whose members fall under those categories, and critics say Trump is essentially wiping out the next generation of leadership in disease control and prevention.

“They are absolutely gambling with the public’s health,” Elizabeth Jacobs, an epidemiologist at the University of Arizona and founder of the grassroots group Defend Public Health, told Truthout. “We’re at the roulette table and hoping that nothing blows up before we can get the infrastructure back in place.”

The threat of mass firing of roughly 5,000 employees across HHS agencies this week appeared sloppy and haphazard, with Kennedy and other Trump officials backpedaling on multiple occasions after it became clear that firing thousands of workers would imperil critical programs such as the Indian Health Service, which provides health care to Native communities across the country.

“We’re at the roulette table and hoping that nothing blows up before we can get the infrastructure back in place.”

At the U.S. Department of Agriculture, hundreds of federal workers on the front lines of the bird flu outbreak received termination letters over the weekend that were rescinded a few days later. It was only the latest embarrassing incident resulting from the purge directed by Trump and unelected billionaire Elon Musk, who has been boasting on social media about using his so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” or “DOGE” as a political weapon against the federal bureaucracy.

A similar scenario played out at the CDC, with Musk and Kennedy appearing to reverse course and sparing an elite group of “disease-detectives” known as the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) from being cut in half after public outcry. According to Denis Nash, a former EIS officer and now professor of epidemiology at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Public Health, the CDC nearly lost a “cornerstone” of its ability to investigate and control disease outbreaks.

“I believe the mere proposition of dismantling such a pivotal program underscores a troubling reality: Our nation’s already tenuous public health infrastructure and response capacity are alarmingly susceptible to political whims and are at risk of being indiscriminately cut,” Nash wrote in StatNews.

However, 16 of 24 fellows were terminated from a similar CDC program that employs scientists to help labs across the country meet safety standards and monitor outbreaks of infectious disease, according to the Associated Press.

Officials originally announced 1,300 job cuts at the CDC on Friday — about 10 percent of the agency’s workforce — but by Wednesday that number had reportedly dropped to about 750, according to CDC employees who spoke to NPR on condition of anonymity. That number could easily change before the smoke around Musk and DOGE finally clears.

Employees described a climate of fear and chaos at the CDC this week, and protest erupted outside CDC offices in Atlanta after job cuts were announced on Tuesday. Jacobs said experts are still trying to wrap their heads around the long-term impacts to the nation’s health and science infrastructure, including state and local public health agencies that depend on funding, data, staffing and guidance coordinated by the CDC and HHS.

“The damage that’s being done to the U.S. science infrastructure is almost too big to fully capture; it’s happening everywhere,” Jacobs told Truthout. “It’s like trying to grab all the fallout from a bomb that’s been dropped on our public health infrastructure, and it’s being done willy-nilly, so we can’t even predict what the outcome would be yet.”

Doctors and public health experts complain that crucial CDC health information went missing online or was delayed for weeks after Trump put a stranglehold on federal agency communications and ordered that government websites be scrubbed of diversity language. On February 11, a federal judge intervened and ordered the CDC and other health agencies to restore data sets and webpages that were censored under Trump’s executive orders, but the disruption delayed the release of key data and research on the seasonal flu and bird flu outbreaks until late last week, according to KFF Health News.

Trump also severed ties with the World Health Organization, leaving international disease tracking programs without data on the bird flu and other diseases.

“It’s like trying to grab all the fallout from a bomb that’s been dropped on our public health infrastructure.”

Jacobs pointed to a CDC study on bird flu infections in dairy and poultry workers that was delayed under Trump’s executive orders. Testing in September of 150 veterinarians who work with cows found that three had previous asymptomatic infections, suggesting that animal-to-human transmission is going undetected to a greater extent than previously known.

Officials close to Trump changed the language of weekly CDC mortality reports during the height of the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020 in order to bolster the president’s rosy propaganda about the pandemic. The study on the bovine veterinarians and CDC’s weekly update on the seasonal flu are both included in these weekly reports.

“The way that public health infrastructure works in this country is that local and county health departments report to state departments, and states report to CDC, and the CDC reports to the American people, and each step in that link is critical,” Jacobs told Truthout.

Jacobs noted that local health departments do communicate with the communities they serve but said doctors across the country rely on guidance and data that was constantly updated on the CDC website until Trump took office and launched a massive campaign of censorship. Despite ongoing legal challenges, Trump’s executive orders left physicians and journalists scrambling to archive important government health data and set up alternative webpages.

“There’s a real fear right now among public health practitioners about what they’re permitted to say and what they are not, and keeping the bird flu data down and delaying it for weeks when you are looking at an outbreak of this magnitude is extremely dangerous,” Jacobs said.

As of February 8, the seasonal flu has caused 29 million illnesses and 16,000 deaths, according to the CDC’s weekly report. The rate of confirmed hospitalizations for the seasonal flu is higher than every peak week going back to 2011. The report for the week ending on February 15 is expected to be released on Friday.

While human-to-human transmission has not been confirmed, and the risk posed by the bird flu infection remains low outside of the poultry and dairy industries, Jacobs said Trump’s blitzkrieg to remake the federal agencies with mass firings and legally dubious power grabs is causing untold damage to the nation’s system for detecting and responding to public health threats.

“It’s not just the actual suppression of data like we saw earlier, but also the generation of fear, which is a very powerful tool if you are trying to control people,” Jacobs said.

Trump’s health secretary spent years promoting baseless conspiracy theories about vaccines, most notably the debunked idea that childhood vaccinations are linked to autism. In order to garner support from skeptical Republicans — notably Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana), who is a physician — Kennedy claimed during recent Senate confirmation hearings that he supports the childhood vaccination schedule.

However, in a private address to HHS employees that leaked to the media this week, Kennedy said “nothing is going to be off limits” in his quest to uncover the roots of chronic disease in the U.S., including “formally taboo” factors such as the childhood vaccination schedule.

“Those who are unwilling to embrace those kinds of ideas can retire,” Kennedy said.

Jacobs said Kennedy wants to oversimplify extremely complex relationships between health exposure and chronic disease with blockbuster claims tying vaccines or food additives to illnesses, but that’s not how research works. Many factors combine to cause chronic disease, including problems Republicans in Congress do not want to fix, such as underfunded public health departments and persistent air and water pollution.

“I want to say clearly that requirements for vaccines for school entry are the most important public health strategy right now for preventing infectious disease, and he announced he’s going ‘look into it’ after all, and that’s alarming, because he cannot be trusted to oversee or interpret legit scientific research,” Jacobs told Truthout.