Opinion: We quit the CDC last year. The problems we protested remain

One year ago, we jointly submitted our resignations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Each of us had been tested as we tried to protect our communities and the agency we loved, but we realized we could no longer remain quiet under this administration. But the political interference and scientific integrity issues we warned about were not isolated. They exposed vulnerabilities that still exist, and will remain after today’s leaders are gone. The answer is not simply to restore the CDC to what it was, but to build a stronger and more resilient public health institution for the future. That requires safeguards so that no administration, Republican or Democratic, can replace independent public health decision-making with partisan ideology. Erica Schwartz, the new CDC director, has pledged scientific rigor and said she would disagree privately with health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. when necessary. But she has not said what she would do if directed to implement a policy that conflicts with science and data. During her confirmation hearing, she stated that vaccines do not cause autism and promised to review the CDC’s misleading webpage. Yet the page remains unchanged. She will have to determine where her line is, just as we did, and what she will do if that line is crossed. The country’s scientific safeguards, however, should not depend on the judgment or resolve of any single leader. Here are four ways that Congress can protect the integrity of the CDC and the health of our country: Shield science from politically driven policies Public health decisions such as quarantine, travel restrictions, and vaccine recommendations can significantly restrict individual liberties. It is therefore essential that agencies issuing these orders explain the evidence, expected benefits, potential harms, and alternatives. Consider the CDC’s inconsistent response this spring to Americans evacuated from a cruise ship with a hantavirus outbreak. Despite CDC guidance supporting home monitoring, the acting director required some passengers to be quarantined in a government facility in Omaha, Neb., for as long as six weeks. (Other passengers were allowed to monitor for symptoms at home.) When one of them challenged the order, a CDC medical officer recommended rescinding it, but Kennedy overruled that recommendation. Congress should require any major public health directive from an agency or its political leadership to include a scientific assessment describing the evidence, uncertainties, and why the action is proportionate to the threat. Political leaders have the authority to make policy and should be accountable for their choices. They should not be able to conceal or rewrite the underlying science or to present a political decision as the agency’s scientific conclusion. This undermining of evidence-based guidance has led health departments and clinicians to turn to U.S. medical organizations and the World Health Organization for recommendations. Protect scientific publication The suspension of the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report in early 2025, the first moratorium in its 60-year history, was an early warning. The report demonstrated the effectiveness of the Covid vaccine, but Jay Bhattacharya — then acting director of the CDC — rejected it, citing methodological flaws. Previous agency protocols placed final scientific review on the weekly reports with a career scientist in the director’s office, usually the chief medical officer or principal deputy director. Both are now political roles. The rejected paper was subsequently published in the journal JAMA Network Open, after the science passed peer review. CDC’s scientific publications and data should be protected by a statutory firewall. Once research passes established agency scientific and ethical review, political officials should not suppress it because its findings are inconvenient. Any decision to delay, alter, or block a report should be documented and made public. Americans should see where scientific review ends and political policy decision-making begins. Restore independent expert advice Federal advisory committees ensure that federal decisions benefit from outside expertise. However, many of these advisory bodies have been eliminated, meetings canceled, and entire panels — such as CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices — dismissed and then hastily reconstituted. Congress should strengthen the laws governing the independence of major federal health advisory committees. Members should be selected transparently based on relevant expertise, with rigorous conflict-of-interest standards, staggered terms spanning administrations, and removal only for predefined reasons. Transparent scientific disagreement strengthens trust. A panel assembled to rubber-stamp a predetermined conclusion does not. Administer funding as directed by Congress After federal staffing cuts in 2025, the CDC now has so-called “zombie” programs that Congress continues to fund, but are functionally dead. This is because the people who ran them — monitoring threats, supporting health departments, and translating evidence into action — are gone, laid off, or put on leave. Congress should require the Department of Health and Human Services and CDC to report whether funded programs have the capacity to fulfill their missions. The executive branch should not be able to dismantle a congressionally funded program through staffing decisions rather than legislation. Political appointees have also directed CDC funding toward their own priorities without following standard competitive processes. Examples include a proposed study that would have delayed the hepatitis B vaccine for newborns in Guinea-Bissau, an African country with high disease rates, and grants allocating $32 million to four communities, including one where SpaceX is located, for “Great Health for America.” Congressional approval should be required for significant discretionary expenditures or those that deviate from congressional appropriations. These reforms will not eliminate political disagreement, nor should they. Questions about government authority, spending, and competing priorities are properly the domain of our democratic process. But how diseases spread and the risks and benefits of interventions are questions for science, not for ideology. One year ago, we resigned because we believed remaining silent would make us complicit with the secretary’s dismantling of both the agency and its long-standing evidence-driven decision-making. We walked out of the CDC, but we did not walk away from public health. Over the past year, we have continued our commitment through work in health departments, communities, universities, and direct patient care. We have continued to use our voices, sometimes at personal and professional cost, because we believe in our country and the opportunity to improve the health of our communities. We still believe in these public health institutions and the public servants working under extraordinary pressure. But hope is not a strategy. Congress must decide whether it will protect the institutions, the people who work to keep us healthy, and the independent process, based on evidence, that has made the U.S. a global public health leader. Debra Houry, M.D., M.P.H., was the CDC’s chief medical officer and is now a senior medical adviser for the California Public Health Network Innovation Exchange, adviser to Jimini Health, and a senior fellow at Yale University School of Public Health. Daniel Jernigan, M.D., M.P.H., was director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, and is a contributing scholar at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Demetre Daskalakis, M.D., M.P.H., was director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases and is a consultant for Sanofi, AstraZeneca, and ViiV Healthcare.