‘America Will Get Sick’ as CDC’s Total Overhaul Takes Shape

It was early 2025, and a disease that had been declared eradicated in the US a quarter-century earlier was spreading rapidly among unvaccinated children in West Texas. As measles breached Gaines County’s borders, local public-health leaders accustomed to getting support from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had to look elsewhere: The CDC was on a “communications pause” that prohibited its workers from talking with any of its state and local partners or publishing data. Not that it might have mattered. The agency’s weekly scientific journal had barely acknowledged the outbreak, and the nation’s new ...