While the Trump administration is carrying out mass firings at the CDC, and top CDC officials who were slated to be fired are resigning, Democrats are accusing President Trump and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. of endangering public health by undermining this government agency.
Senator Elizabeth Warren, for instance, torches Trump for “purging the CDC leadership” and says of Trump and RFK, “These fools can’t be trusted with your health.” Likewise:
- Senator Parry Murray says that RFK has “taken utterly reckless steps to dismantle our public health infrastructure,” and “we should all be deeply disturbed by the resignation of highly qualified CDC officials whose work quite literally saves lives.”
- President Biden’s HHS Secretary, Xavier Becerra, declares that “three leading scientists at the CDC who resigned” were “essential public health leaders who helped our country get out of the pandemic.”
- Senator Andy Kim alleges that the CDC was the “gold standard” that “set the mark for the rest of the world” but is now in “shambles from what Trump and Kennedy have done.”
In reality, however, the CDC issued reams of unscientific pronouncements that killed and harmed multitudes of people during the Covid-19 pandemic. This includes but isn’t limited to the following 12 examples:
1) The CDC denied that Covid-19 was mainly transmitted through tiny airborne particles called aerosols, even though:
- the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases published a statement signed by 239 scientists documenting “more than enough supporting evidence” that C-19 is “airborne” and proper “control measures” are “needed” to deal with this reality.
- at least 20 studies showed that aerosols play a dominant role in the transmission of all infectious respiratory microbes, including SARS-CoV-2.
2) When the CDC finally stopped minimizing the threat of airborne transmission in 2021, CDC officials engaged in a cover-up to hide the fatal consequences of their fecklessness and allowed countless preventable deaths to continue in high-risk settings like nursing homes.
3) In 2021, the CDC told school officials to impose “physical distancing” requirements of “at least 6 feet,” “require universal and correct use of masks,” “closely and regularly monitor the numbers of students, teachers, and staff with Covid-19,” and consider closing “classrooms or schools” that have “an active outbreak,” even though Sweden had already:
- kept its schools open with 1.95 million children the prior spring without class-size reductions, masking, or vaccines.
- experienced zero child Covid deaths over this period.
- had an ICU admission rate for teachers that was half that of other professions.
- experienced no difference with Finland in the incidence of C-19 infections among school-aged children, even though Finland closed its schools.
4) In 2022, the CDC claimed that “Covid-19 is a leading cause of death in children,” even though:
- the CDC’s own data showed that 1% of all deaths of children in the U.S. involved C-19, or one out of every 145,936 children during the first 19 months of the pandemic.
- in 2021, the journal Nature Medicine published a study of children who “died from” C-19 as opposed to “those who died of another cause but were coincidentally infected with the virus,” and the study found that C-19 took the lives of two out of every million children in England during the first year of the pandemic.
- children in the U.S. were five times more likely to die of drowning and 36 times more likely to die of accidents than the real Covid death rate of two in a million.
5) The CDC called for “universal masking” down to the age of “2 years,” even though:
- eight scientists—led by a former Biden Covid advisor—warned the CDC in 2021 that its mask guidance was littered with “serious errors.”
- an analysis of CDC mask studies published by the American Journal of Medicine in 2023 found that “the level of evidence generated was low and the conclusions were most often unsupported by the data.”
- no gold standard study ever found that masks save lives.
- dozens of studies show that masks cause significant harms.
6) The CDC falsely portrayed exercising while masked as risk-free and downplayed the level of cardio-pulmonary stress that it creates.
7) The CDC made it very difficult for readers to see how they were distorting mask studies by creating “science briefs” with unclickable footnotes and failing to link to the vast majority of sources they cited. Thus, inquisitive readers had to take note of the footnote numbers, scroll down to the bottom of the CDC webpage to locate the source, conduct a separate search for the source, and then scroll back up to the location where they were reading. In a typical academic journal, all of this can be done with a few simple clicks.
8) The CDC alleged that Covid-19 was a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” while more than 50% of Covid deaths were occurring among the fully vaccinated.
9) The CDC claimed that “Covid-19 vaccines have undergone” the “most intensive safety monitoring in U.S. history” and recommended them to “all children, including children who have already had Covid-19,” even though the vaccine clinical trials:
- did not enroll enough children to show any clinically meaningful benefits like preventing severe Covid-19, hospitalization, or death.
- needed to be 400,000 times larger/longer to determine if the vaccines save more toddlers and preschoolers than they kill
- excluded children who were apt to have serious adverse reactions to the vaccines, but some still experienced fevers up to 105.4 ºF, eye-rolling seizures, convulsions, limping, and a “severe” decline in white blood cells that creates the “risk of overwhelming infection.”
10) The CDC claimed without evidence in June 2022 that “our cells break down mRNA from these vaccines and get rid of it within a few days after vaccination,” even though:
- three months before that, the journal Cell published a study which “detected vaccine mRNA collected in the GCs [germinal centers] of LNs [lymph nodes] on days 7, 16, and 37 postvaccination, with lower but still appreciable specific signal at day 60.”
- the study did not look beyond 60 days, so the mRNA may remain even longer.
11) The CDC claimed in 2023 that “everyone age 6 months and older” should receive “an updated Covid-19 vaccine” to prevent “death,” even though:
- no clinical trial found that mRNA Covid vaccines save more lives than they take.
- naturally acquired immunity creates strong and lasting protection against serious harms of the disease.
- Covid deaths enduringly plunged after nearly everyone caught the disease, not when vaccines were deployed.
12) The CDC told summer camp operators in 2021 to:
- require staff and campers down to “2 years old” to “wear masks at all times, except when eating and drinking or swimming.”
- make campers play “sports and athletic activities” in the “outdoors” while “wearing a mask” and “staying at least 6 feet away from others.”
- “provide physical guides, such as tape on floors or sidewalks and signs on walls, to ensure that staff and campers remain distanced.”
- “ask campers and staff who are not fully vaccinated” to “provide proof of a negative viral test taken no more than 1–3 days before arriving at camp,” “engage in a 2-week prearrival quarantine,” and then “stay home and self-quarantine for a full 7 days after travel.”
- “notify the health department immediately following a positive test result” and quarantine the “infected person” in “an isolation room.”
- “quarantine for 14 days” “anyone else who was within 6 feet of the infected person for a cumulative total of 15 minutes or more over a 24-hour period.”
None of these CDC failures were a result of “evolving science” but of callous disregard for readily available facts. As a result, countless people were killed and harmed physically, financially, educationally, and emotionally.
Meanwhile, others who defied the CDC’s proclamations—which were adopted and enforced by governments and corporations—were fired, censored, arrested, and denied access to schools, supermarkets, hospitals, and streets.
Revealing that those debacles were not just due to a few years of poor leadership, nine former directors and acting directors of the CDC back to 1977 recently penned an op-ed for the New York Times in which they:
- accuse RFK of “endangering every American’s health,”
- tout the CDC as the “world’s pre-eminent public health agency,” and
- assert that Covid vaccines “saved millions of lives.”
To support that last claim, they link to a thinly documented study from a group called the Commonwealth Fund based on a “computer model.” Left unstated by the study’s authors and these former CDC directors is that such model-based studies:
- “provide only theoretical evidence” and should not be used “as evidence to inform or change policy measures,” as warned by Public Health England, the UK equivalent of the CDC.
- rely “upon a host of simplifying assumptions” and “cannot be fully” representative of the real world, as admitted by scholars who conducted a similar study published by the prestigious medical journal The Lancet.
- “produce highly uncertain numbers,” and therefore, “modellers must not be permitted to project more certainty than their models deserve; and politicians must not be allowed to offload accountability to models of their choosing,” as warned by 22 scholars in the journal Nature near the outset of the pandemic.
Using such weak evidence to make definitive claims is exactly what the CDC did throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. The fact that a long line of former CDC directors are doing the same lends credence to Trump, RFK, and others who say that the agency is in dire need of a housecleaning.
James D. Agresti is the president of Just Facts, a research and educational institute dedicated to publishing facts about public policies and teaching research skills.
