Inside the Chaos at the C.D.C.

A month ago, on August 8th, Dan Jernigan, a bespectacled sixty-one-year-old scientist, was the lone senior leader on the campus of the Centers for Disease Control, in Atlanta. He sat at his desk in a five-story glass-and-concrete building that contains the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, the largest of the C.D.C.’s dozen centers. Jernigan was its director. He’d been at the agency, in a variety of roles, including ones overseeing vaccine safety and influenza control, for thirty years, under five Presidents. It was five o’clock, on a typical Friday, when he heard what sounded like a jackhammer outside the building. The sound continued for nearly fifteen minutes. “A laboratory-science lead came to my office,” Jernigan told me. “She’s on the phone with her husband”—also a C.D.C. employee—“whose building nearby was shaking. She’s, like, ‘Do you hear that?’ I’m, like, ‘Yeah.’ She said, ‘Is that an active shooter?’ I’m, like, ‘No, no.’ I think a lot of us were thinking, Why would anyone do that? And then it stopped, and then it started up again.” Other employees were confused, too. Jernigan recalled, “One person a floor below me, in our migration-and-health group, had somebody come to her office who said, ‘Hey, do you hear that sound?’ They got up to go to another part of the building, and just then a bullet hit her glass.”

A text alert from neighboring Emory University pinged: active shooter. A thirty-year-old Georgia man, convinced that the COVID-19 vaccine had made him sick, had stolen guns from his father and killed a police officer, and eventually himself, after unloading some two hundred rounds at C.D.C. buildings, including Jernigan’s. Along with a group of other employees, Jernigan had eventually taken cover at the center of his building’s top floor. “It was me,” he said, “a management official, a science-official policy person, a cleaning person, and several others kind of huddled together. One person who was really strong throughout the thing—saying, ‘This is going to be fine’ and ‘Stay away from the windows’—I found out a few days later that she was having significant problems. She had been in Afghanistan, and I think this incident brought back way more than I had recognized for her.”

Jernigan, for his part, felt an even greater sense of purpose, in spite—or even because—of the peril. As a global-health expert, he’d led teams that had successfully responded to SARS, Ebola, anthrax, and COVID. “If anything, it was, like, ‘I’m not giving up,’ right?” he told me. “I mean, for us who have no trouble going to West Africa where Ebola is, or Southeast Asia for some unknown respiratory illness—you know, we recognize there’s risk. And, it’s not right, but we recognize that there’s risk to come to work here, too.”

What most troubled Jernigan, in the wake of the shooting, was the eerie silence above him about what had taken place. Three weeks after the attack, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., fired the newly installed C.D.C. director and brought in Jim O’Neill, a biotech investor with no training in medicine or health care—as well as Lynda Chapman, a lawyer whose previous health-care experience reportedly includes having once worked as a pharmacist at Walgreens, as C.O.O. “Our new chief operating officer, I think, doesn’t really understand what happened and doesn’t really want to admit what happened,” Jernigan reflected, referring to Chapman. “Five hundred bullets shot at us and not a word from the President, either,” Jernigan added. “So I don’t understand. I don’t understand why that’s acceptable. They’re still working on the windows.” He surveyed the damage a few days after the shooting. “Many of the floors you still cannot go onto,” he said. “It’s been very difficult for people to go back to their offices and see where the bullets went right past their desk.” Not long after the shooting, a sign appeared on the cracked window of one of the buildings that the gunman had attacked. “FUCK RFK!” it read.

A few current C.D.C. employees, who recently spoke to me on the condition of anonymity, described how it feels to remain at the agency after eight months of turmoil under the second Trump Administration. They pointed back to the humiliations wrought by the Department of Government Efficiency, beginning with an e-mail, in February, from Elon Musk encouraging them to quit their jobs and enter the private sector. “That e-mail sent shock waves through us,” one employee told me. “Out of nowhere, looked like spam, seemed ridiculous and against federal policy. And so insulting. Since then, we’ve constantly had something new uprooting us.” Another employee added, “We’ve gone from sending our five bullet points to justify our ‘lower productivity jobs in the public sector’ to actual bullets. Ten years ago, we were heroes for deploying to West Africa for the Ebola outbreak, protecting our country from the spread of the disease, and now, somehow, we are the villains. It’s crushing that those appointed to lead us and the people we aim to protect think we are actively deceiving them.” This employee was near “a breaking point.” The other employee was, too: “Everyone has a limit,” they told me, “and there are many of us being pushed to the brink.”

So, too, is America’s public-health system. It will be something of a miracle, Jernigan thinks, if the country’s next major health threat is met with the same skill, resources, and strategy as the last one. “Having spent fifteen years in influenza, I know that, any day, a new pandemic can start, because of the way that that virus works,” he told me. “It changes itself constantly. It could come out of Mexico. It could come out of Southeast Asia. Who knows? There’s nothing preventing another flu pandemic or another coronavirus—a different coronavirus—from emerging and just doing the same thing all over again. And we’re not prepared for it.” He paused to answer the phone. It was a C.D.C. staffer who had been helping Jernigan sort through early retirement papers. He’d resigned.

When it became clear that the crusading environmental lawyer turned conspiracist R.F.K., Jr., would become the next Secretary of H.H.S., in January, Jernigan was among the leaders at the C.D.C. who felt compelled to finally read Kennedy’s 2src23 book, “Vax-Unvax.” Jernigan described it to me as “somewhat of a playbook. You can see in it the arguments that are being put forward now, the efforts that are happening right now.” He and his colleagues combed through the book and then combed through the scientific literature, “constantly rechecking his statements,” in order to prepare for the new leadership. He continued, “We already had some balanced interpretation of the data, so that if we were asked”—about an alleged link, say, between autism and vaccines—“we could provide unbiased scientific opinions.” Many such opinions were available on the C.D.C.’s website when R.F.K., Jr., assumed his post.

Thimerosal, a preservative used in some vaccines, and endorsed as safe and effective by the American Academy of Pediatrics, among other scientific and medical bodies, was among the first targets of Kennedy’s H.H.S. The C.D.C. had an explanation of the compound’s benefits and safety on its website, but, Jernigan told me, “the Secretary said, ‘Take that down,’ and indicated that it was not approved by him, which was quite a change in the way things are done. There’s never been that kind of approval chain.”

It wasn’t that Kennedy’s H.H.S. and the C.D.C. didn’t have some areas of agreement; it was Kennedy’s approach that vexed Jernigan and others. “His focus on infectious diseases—that’s great,” Jernigan said. “I like infectious diseases. His idea about focussing on chronic diseases, that’s a very good thing, too. The problem was that the Chronic Diseases Center was removed, the funding was cut, thousands of people were let go. So you may have a priority—and it may be valid—but if your money’s cut and your people are cut and you’re undercutting the science, you’re not going to be able to achieve it. So it was hard for us to understand where his priorities could be implemented in the environment that he was generating.”