4 min readThe upcoming edition of The New York Times Magazine has a deep and profound spelunking down through the rubble that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has created out of what once was the world’s most effective public-health organization: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And if you think your capacity to be appalled by the arrogance with which this administration defends its own abject incompetence is used up, pour yourself a tall one and read this piece by Jeneen Interlandi, a byline with which I was not familiar but that goes into my Automatic Read bank hereafter.
It’s an extraordinary dissection of the damage one crackpot can do to an important government agency in less than a year. Secretary Roadkill couldn’t have caused more wreckage if he’d simply carpet-bombed the CDC campus in Atlanta. The sources in the piece are former CDC employees who bailed during Trump II because they saw what was coming when the CDC was handed over to Kennedy and his acolytes in the Church of Medical Woo-Woo.
Since his confirmation in February 2025, Kennedy has taken particular aim at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a federal agency charged with safeguarding the nation’s public health. He has called the CDC “the most corrupt agency at H.H.S. and maybe the government” and vigorously defended mass terminations carried out by Elon Musk’s DOGE. At least 2,400 employees, or 18 percent of the CDC staff, have been fired or have resigned since January 2025.
Kennedy has said that the CDC—which comprises more than 20 centers focused on a wide range of public health issues, including infectious diseases, food-borne illness, substance abuse and violence prevention—had grown unwieldy and that its size was undermining its mission. As proof, he has cited the agency’s failures during the coronavirus pandemic. “We literally did worse than any country in the world,” he said at a Senate hearing in September, “and the people at CDC who oversaw that process, who put masks on our children, who closed our schools, are the people who will be leaving.”
The carnage began with an attack on CDC’s information-gathering and communications apparatus. An epidemiologist told Interlandi:
They took control of all our communications. There was a Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report that came out on February 27 on cervical cancer trends. In response to a standard question from a reporter, one author said that one of the best ways to prevent cervical cancer is to get the HPV vaccine. And HHS edited it, adding a message to the effect of “vaccines are a matter of choice, and you should talk to your doctor,” attributing it to the scientist without telling her. Thank God somebody alerted her before it went out.
Then there was the mindless reactionary reflex against international cooperation, which was part of the administration’s destruction of the USAID program. Daniel Jernigan, a former director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, said:
There was no understanding of the connectivities between the U.S. government and W.H.O. There was magical thinking that you could build a bilateral set of relationships that would take care of what W.H.O. is doing. For flu, we had 57 different bilateral cooperative agreements with countries. But to make things happen, we went through W.H.O., because they have the ability to bring people together. Without W.H.O. involved, there’s an uncertainty among some nations about whether or not to work with the United States at all.
Ebola is one example of how this works. Do we hear about cases because we have given money to a country’s ministry of health and they’re required to let us know? No. We hear about them because we have people who are doing contract services out in the forest or we’ve got people who have spent 15 years working on the same projects. The loss of that soft surveillance is really significant.
CDC also did a lot of work on malaria through USAID and that work was all stopped. We already have some 2,500 traveler-acquired malaria cases in the United States, and two years ago we had 10 cases of local transmission. Those numbers will increase now, and the costs of dealing with malaria will go up, especially in places like Florida, Puerto Rico and Texas.
I could quote the whole thing, but I think you should discover the rest of its treasures on your own. It’s a guided tour through Crazytown. And, not for nothing, the story has appeared the same week that the New York Post published a selection from RFK Jr.’s personal journals and boy howdy is there some seriously weird shite in there. Apparently the secretary fell under the spell of a series of scientific freakazoids.
It would foreshadow Bobby’s later life—such as when he scooped up a road-killed bear on a New York State highway in 2014, dumping it in Central Park when he realized he needed to catch a plane. In his diary, he writes about cutting off the penis of a road-killed raccoon in 2001, while his “kids waited patiently in the car,” so that he could examine it later.
Beautiful. The Victor Frankenstein of the I-95 breakdown lane.
