Even the lowest of the low in corporate America don’t treat people like this. But Donald Trump and Elon Musk and their minions do. This is not how to fire anybody, let alone a civil servant. Imagine how it must feel to go to work as usual, insert your security badge in the slot and….nothing. It no longer works and neither do you. You have been un-personed. And it gets worse from there. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s method of forcing out senior administration officials is to tell them that they’ve been reassigned to Indian Health Services territories, which entails moving to other parts of the country. Vicious. Nothing short of utterly vicious.
Notices began arriving at 5 a.m., workers said, affecting offices responsible for everything from global health to medical devices to communications. Some knew the layoffs were coming; at the department headquarters in Washington, officials responsible for minority health and infectious disease prevention were told Friday that their offices were being eliminated, according to employees.
Others were caught off guard. At the Food and Drug Administration, senior leaders were pushed out and offices focused on food, drug and medical device policy were hit with deep staff reductions amounting to about 3,500 agency staff members. Some workers said that they discovered they were fired when they attempted to scan their badge to get into the building early Tuesday.
The top tobacco regulator, Brian King, was offered a job with a regional office of the Indian Health Service that includes Alaska, according to Mitch Zeller, his predecessor at the division. Other staff who oversee veterinary medicine and coordinate the complex work of reviewing new drug applications that can run for thousands of pages were let go.
Some leaders at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, including Kayla Laserson, who led the global health center, received similar notices of reassignment or were placed on administrative leave. At the agency, the reorganization, with cuts totaling 2,400, seemed aimed at narrowing its focus to infectious diseases. Entire departments studying chronic diseases and environmental problems were cut.
Employees laid off at the agency included those studying injuries, asthma, lead poisoning, smoking and radiation damage, as well as those that assess the health effects of extreme heat and wildfires.
But some infectious disease teams were also laid off. A group focused on improving access to vaccines among underserved communities was cut, as was a group of global health researchers who were working on preventing mother to child transmission of H.I.V.
H.I.V. prevention was a big target overall. Jonathan Mermin, director of the center for H.I.V. and sexually transmitted diseases, was placed on administrative leave. The Trump administration had been weighing moving the C.D.C.’s division of H.I.V. prevention to a different agency within the health department. But on Tuesday, teams leading H.I.V. surveillance and research within that division were laid off. It was unclear whether some of those functions would be recreated elsewhere.
And Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, who succeeded Dr. Fauci as the director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is amongst the people who is being forced out — or she can accept a post in Utah, Nevada, wherever and perhaps she will. I’m sure that a lot of these people see this madness for exactly what it is, the muscle flex of deranged leaders and a storm to be weathered.
Meanwhile, do everything you can to stay healthy. And hope that a new strain of the pandemic doesn’t hit for a few years because we have willfully obliterated all of our defenses against same. And Bobby will just tell you to take cod liver oil or something equally asinine, or Ivermectin, which is literally and figuratively asinine (seeing as how an ass is an equine species like the horse.) This is the new state of *health* in this country, folks.
Progress has stopped. No new drugs will be developed and existed pharmacology is now impaired. Diseases could spread, just like what is happening with measles in Texas. This is the new abnormal. I guess we learn to adapt and hunker down.
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Friends, if you have any loose change you want to contribute to the cause here at PZ, it would be welcomed. Thank you. Ursula
I always think of the children…I guess growing up an abused child in a time where no one ever heard of CPS or DSS, I know some are going to die. THAT’S A GODDAMN FACT! All the deaths and disabilities that will come without vigorous vaccination programs are blood on the hands OF ALL YOU PISSANTS WHO VOTED FOR THESE NAZI BASTARDS. FACT!!!!!
For each death and each tear that follows in mourning…may you spend a thousand years in HELL.