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Remember back on April 1 when Trump and his brainworm sidekick RFK, Jr. laid off tens of thousands of employees from across all our national health agencies, only the joke was on us because it wasn’t an April Fool’s gag? True story: that April slaughter included all of those agencies’ communications departments. Prior to Trump (the scurvy of presidents) trudging his way back to office, the CDC had a robust circulatory system (medical pun!) of 150+ newsletters and regularly posted to their socials with over 12 million subscribers. We’ve come a long way from the Pony Express, hooray. Or we had, before RFK, Jr. seized control of CDC’s communications writ large — including taking ownership of their social media accounts — to essentially halt the CDC’s fundamental mission to warn and inform the public.
A grim diagnosis: “Public health functions best when its experts are allowed to communicate the work that they do in real time, and that’s not happening,” said Kevin Griffis, who served as the director of communications at the CDC until March. “That could put people’s lives at risk.” … “We are functionally unable to operate communications,” said one of the CDC workers. “We feel like our hands are tied behind our backs.”
In-house comms were better: Before Trump was inaugurated, the CDC managed most of its communication. HHS, the agency that oversees the CDC and more than 20 divisions and agencies, rarely reviewed the content in CDC social media posts or newsletters, CDC workers said. That allowed the CDC to communicate quickly and often. “The whole goal is to say, this is what we know. And here are the best recommendations from experts in the field,” said Dr. Jodie Guest, a professor and senior vice chair of the Department of Epidemiology at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health. “And this is the best advice about the way the general population should handle things in order to protect their health.”
Social distancing: More than 12 million people subscribe to the CDC’s main Facebook, Instagram, X and LinkedIn accounts. … On April 24, some employees were sent an email from a supervisor that confirmed that HHS now owned the CDC’s main social media platforms, including its X, Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook accounts. “We were also notified that HHS is not accepting content for those channels at this time,” the email added.
HHS is blocking nearly all posts: Since HHS approval was instituted as a requirement for posting, almost no newsletters have been sent to the tens of thousands of people who subscribe to them, CDC workers said. … Two CDC employees who work in communications told NPR that fewer than half of the public health posts they’ve sent to HHS for approval have been cleared for publication on social media. Even posts that include basic information about recent disease outbreaks, like the number of people sickened or hospitalized, have not been posted as requested by employees, NPR confirmed after reviewing posts submitted for approval by an employee.
Locked out: Removing all the CDC’s web developers, graphic designers and social media staffers simultaneously caused a problem. The CDC was suddenly locked out of its main social media accounts, said three people close to the situation. “The passwords to those accounts were kept on a password protected Word doc,” said one worker at the CDC. “And that Word doc was inaccessible for anyone left, because all of the people that could have opened that document were fired.”
You know what hasn’t had a severe reduction in workforce this year? Germs, diseases, chronic illnesses, and all the joys our bodies experience if we’re lucky enough to age. Measles in particular has had a very strong start to 2025, with former health officials declaring the West Texas outbreak is putting America on track for the worst outbreak this century. Oh, and speaking of measles spreading from a largely unvaccinated community, remember when RFK, Jr. finally set foot in Texas at Measles HQ, to visit with parents who’d rather let their children get gravely ill — and in some cases, die — than get vaccinated, after hearing wingnuts like him espouse anti-vaxx nonsense? Yeah, well, true story: one of the few official CDC tweets this spring was words of praise for RFK, likely written by some underling at HHS and tagged onto a retweet from Bobby’s own account about the visit. Current CDC workers view the move as propaganda. Because it is. RFK, Jr. — the brainworm that keeps on giving… illness.
God help us all.
We need more than help. God is close to washing his hands of this whole debacle.
They’re trying to cull the herd.
Ignorant, frightened, and short-lived.
That’s what Felon47 and the MAGAts want for 99% of the American people.
#Resist 🇺🇸💙💔💙🌎
🎯
Right this second, on the KABC (Ch 7) local news: “NV181 is the newest Covid variant that is already here in California. It is HIGHLY contagious…” And yet, because of the brain-worm-addled RFK, Jr., we may not have access to a new Covid booster (should we choose to use the common sense God gave a mule) to protect ourselves from a preventable diseases. MAKE IT MAKE SENSE!!
People, use common sense: if you’re in a crowded space, with people you do not know, wear your masks. Continue to wash your hands/use hand sanitizer after touching common places such as door handles, elevator buttons, etc.
We are literally on our own now.
Exactly right. Stock up on PPE again now, and start wearing masks in any situation. The government is not going to help us.
What’s even worse is there are MAGA politicians pushing for bans on mask wearing. Like Nassau County Executive Bruce Blankman on Long Island, who got a county wide mask ban passed. MAGA doesn’t want us to protect ourselves in any way. But they do want to tell a woman what she can do with her body.
this is one way to cut the medicare/Medicaid roles.
If there was a god, people like Trump would not exist or would die horribly in a painful way. So my beliefs or rather non-beliefs have been confirmed by his very existence…good people continue to perish in awful ways for no reason every day and this demented cruel racist collection of diseased cellular material lives on..,
The only thing that can be blamed on God is that he gave us all free will. How we behave is up to us, not Him.
The safety of the the drug, food and water supply has fallen. Please mask up and be as careful as you can. These policies are eugenics in action. About a month ago I had symptoms of rsv, nanovifus, covid and flu. I tested negative for everything, but could hardly catch my breath and was having horrific dizziness and cold sweats. I haven’t been that sick since 2019 right before the pandemic hit in 2020.
That sounds scary. And it sounds exactly like the mystery illness that I’ve had for the past 3 or 4 weeks. I’m currently taking 6 prescriptions in the hopes that it will go away and not turn into pneumonia. My doctor is great but even he doesn’t know exactly what it is. I hope you’re feeling better now, and I hope I’ll feel better soon too. I’m planning to go back to masking in public, but it’s hard when my husband goes off to an office filled with people every day. If he’s not also masking at all times in public, I worry that my own masking won’t matter. What a mess we’re all in.
This is when I knew there is no helping the MAGA cult. When Trump said he’d make this lunatic whose brain was destroyed by heroin and a worm the health secretary and would “let him go crazy on the medicines.” Who could possibly ever want something so bleak? They did. They are beyond helping at this point.
This absolutely will kill people.
I am convinced that I am only alive because about a day before I showed up in an ER with a bad case of pneumonia the hospital had received a notification from the CDC about an outbreak in our area of some nasty adenoviruses causing deaths from pneumonia. Because of that notice, they didn’t discharge me with meds but rather plunked me down in the hospital while they waited for test results to see if I had that virus (which I did), which was great because by the next day I had very clear signs that I was going into sepsis and ended up in intensive care.
Had the hospital not received that notice from the CDC I likely would have been discharged and not survived.