| The government shutdown has accelerated the Trump administration's ongoing efforts to shrink the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Some 600 people were cut over the weekend, according to a spokesperson for the local Atlanta chapter of the American Federation of Government Employees. The reductions hit the Washington branch of the CDC and pared staff in policy, communications, including the Preventing Chronic Disease journal, and human resources, according to people familiar with the reductions. This didn't come without some vacillating — late Friday, some 1,300 staffers received "reduction in force" notices, but within 24 hours around half of those people got their jobs back after a wave of public outcry. A Health and Human Services official blamed it on a glitch in the system. Still, the moves follow a pattern under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. On Valentine's Day, the day after Kennedy was sworn in, some 1,300 CDC employees were laid off. Around 14% of those people were asked to return in March. Then on April 1, another 2,400 employees were laid off (it wasn't an April Fool's joke). The American Federation of Government Employees sued the administration over that round of cuts, with the most cuts in chronic disease and injury prevention centers. Kennedy told reporters in April some of the cuts were a "mistake." By the summer, around a quarter of those workers were brought back. The legal challenge is still ongoing. Kennedy's long been public about his distrust of vaccines and in the CDC. Public health advocates are watching his moves closely as a result. In one of the more dramatic moves over the summer, Kennedy fired an entire panel of experts that make vaccine recommendations and replaced them with a group that included some Covid and childhood vaccine skeptics. Two months later, Kennedy abruptly fired the newly appointed, Senate-confirmed CDC director Susan Monarez. Monarez went public about a disagreement she'd had with the health secretary in which she says she refused to rubber stamp vaccine recommendations from his new panel without seeing the science backing the decisions. (Kennedy, in a Congressional hearing, said that conversation never happened and claimed he fired her because she admitted she was untrustworthy.) Public health experts who've been worried about the long-term future of the CDC found the weekend's layoffs alarming. Demetre Daskalakis, former director of the CDC's center for immunizations and respiratory diseases who resigned in August when Monarez was fired, called Friday's cuts a "lethal injection" in a post on X in which he likened the CDC to a patient in intensive care. His former division was among those hit by the job cuts before they were reversed — in particular the leader of the measles response division. Other programs cut then reinstated included the team running the Ebola response in Africa and the staff of the journal that publishes updates on outbreaks. Even so, he said in a subsequent X post: "CDC damage is done. Rescinded firings or not. US health security is compromised." The union's still fighting to get more of the jobs restored. The AFGE filed a fresh lawsuit in California on Sept. 30 against the head of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, over the mere threat of layoffs. The union argues the layoffs are illegal during a government shutdown and the first hearing is scheduled for Oct. 15. Even if some or all of the positions are restored, the cuts at the agency have exacerbated the continued instability and eroded public health in the US. — Jessica Nix | 
