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Published: April 30, 2026
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Three developments at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this month, taken together, capture the precarious moment American public health is in. A scientifically sound study showing the benefit of Covid vaccines was suppressed; a new director and chief medical officer were nominated to lead the agency; and the Epidemic Intelligence Service marked seventy-five years of training the disease detectives who have responded to nearly every major public health crisis since 1951. None of these stories should be read in isolation, because the institutional capacity at stake in each of them is the same.
A Vaccine Study the Public Was Not Allowed to See
Two weeks ago I wrote about the CDC being blocked from publishing a study showing that Covid vaccines reduced hospitalizations by approximately 55 percent during the past winter season. An HHS spokesman confirmed last week that the study would not be published, citing methodological concerns. The same methodology was used for a flu vaccine study published in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report only a week before the Covid study was blocked, and that flu study was not flagged as methodologically suspect by anyone.
The pattern is now clear, and it confirms the concern many of us raised when this administration took office. Covid vaccine effectiveness data, even when produced by professional epidemiologists using methods the agency itself accepts for other vaccines, will be suppressed when it tells a story that conflicts with the political narrative HHS leadership wants to advance. That is not a methodological dispute; it is a policy of selective disclosure, and the cost is paid by clinicians who cannot give their patients straight answers about which vaccines work and by patients who deserve those answers.
New Leaders, Mixed Signals
The White House nominated Dr. Erica Schwartz, a former deputy surgeon general and retired Coast Guard officer, to serve as the permanent CDC director, and announced Dr. Jennifer Shuford, the Texas state health commissioner, as incoming chief medical officer. The public health community should treat this as a partial victory in an ongoing fight to preserve the CDC’s institutional integrity. I have heard concerns from current and former CDC colleagues about Schwartz’s record as deputy surgeon general, and I have heard genuine relief about Shuford, whose work during the large 2024 measles outbreak in Texas earned the respect of professionals who watched her operate under pressure.
Whether Shuford can serve as an effective counterbalance to the anti-science positions HHS leadership continues to advance is an open question, and the answer will depend in part on whether her hiring is intended as substantive correction or as institutional cover. The CDC needs a chief medical officer who can win arguments inside the building, not one whose presence is used to deflect criticism while the underlying policies continue.
Seventy-Five Years of the Epidemic Intelligence Service
The Epidemic Intelligence Service, established at the CDC in 1951, has trained more than 4,300 officers over its history, including physicians, veterinarians, nurses, pharmacists, and lawyers. EIS alumni have led or contributed to the response to nearly every major public health emergency of the past seven decades: smallpox eradication, the early years of HIV/AIDS, Ebola outbreaks in West Africa, the 2001 anthrax attacks, multiple influenza pandemics, and Covid-19. One in three state epidemiologists in the United States today is an EIS alumnus, and four of the twelve directors in CDC history completed the program.
I joined EIS after my medical residency, and the program taught me skills I could not have learned anywhere else: how to design epidemiologic studies during real outbreaks, how to develop policy and communicate it to the public, how to work with government agencies at every level domestically and internationally. The training takes two years, and the products of those two years are people who can run an outbreak response when one is needed. At a moment when the CDC’s institutional capacity is under unprecedented strain, including cuts to public health programs that save lives and money, what seventy-five years of EIS investment has built deserves more than a commemorative anniversary. It deserves protection.
The temptation, when an administration is hostile to evidence and willing to suppress data, is to despair about science itself. The right response is the opposite. We need more trials, more rigorous review of the data they produce, and more protection for the institutions that have spent three quarters of a century turning science into health promotion and disease prevention. The CDC, EIS, and the working epidemiologists who staff state and local health departments are the difference between a country that can detect and contain outbreaks and a country that learns about them on the news.
