KFF As measles surged in Texas early this year, the Trump administration’s actions sowed fear and confusion among CDC scientists that kept them from performing the agency’s most critical function — emergency response — when it mattered most, an investigation from KFF Health News shows. The outbreak soon became the worst the United States has endured in over three decades.
In the month after Donald Trump took office, his administration interfered with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention communications, stalled the agency’s reports, censored its data, and abruptly laid off staff. In the chaos, CDC experts felt restrained from talking openly with local public health workers, according to interviews with seven CDC officials with direct knowledge of events, as well as local health department emails obtained by KFF Health News through public records requests.
“CDC hasn’t reached out to us locally,” Katherine Wells, the public health director in Lubbock, Texas, wrote in a Feb. 5 email exchange with a colleague two weeks after children with measles were hospitalized in Lubbock. “My staff feels like we are out here all alone,” she added.