“While their role has diminished in this current crisis, they play a very important role in it,” she said. The new administration will rebuild the public health and data infrastructure, restore CDC staff to its overseas outposts, and return control to the CDC.
There is a palpable sense of relief and a determination to return to an apolitical identity within the CDC, according to four senior scholars who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of losing their jobs.
“We couldn’t allow ourselves to be politicized at this point,” said one of the scientists involved in the agency’s pandemic response. “We didn’t want to spend time licking wounds and worrying about what had gone wrong in the past.”
Another senior CDC scientist said, “Sometimes you just feel compelled to say, ‘I don’t care what happens, I have to do this.'”
Until the pandemic, the CDC was widely recognized as the world’s leading public health agency. However, the confusion of academics by the Trump administration and the politicization of some of its advice has hampered efforts to answer critical questions, experts say, including how schools, churches and businesses should reopen and how Americans can best protect themselves and their families could.
The turnaround began after the Trump administration interfered with the CDC’s vaunted weekly bulletins, the weekly reports on morbidity and mortality, according to Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, who headed the agency under President Barack Obama.
Political officials attempted to revise, delay, or even stop the publication of the reports, leading to public outcry and condemnation at a hearing in Congress. The cloud of dust led to the swift exit of Michael Caputo, a political representative who had accused CDC scientists of the riot, and Dr. Paul Alexander, a science advisor hired to help Mr. Caputo.
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