CDC scraps plan to help Texas schools curb measles over layoffs, employee says
record outbreak
of the virus were warned they could face layoffs, an agency employee said.
CDC officials
had initially weighed expanding a service they had been offering to hospitals in Texas — onsite assessments to root out how errors in ventilation and air filtration could be enabling spread of the virus – to other kinds of facilities like schools as well.
"Being on the ground allows us to actually look at the filters that are in place, look at the HVAC systems, how they're set up, how they're being used, how they're being monitored. And after seeing what we did, I'm glad we did," Dylan Neu, who had led the CDC's ventilation assessments in Texas, told CBS News.
Neu is a biomedical engineer for the CDC's National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, or NIOSH,
which was largely eliminated
by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s
first wave of layoffs
earlier this month.
Two experts from NIOSH — Neu and an industrial hygienist — were first sent to Texas on March 20 at the state's request. They found a number of issues at hospitals in Texas that had been actively treating measles patients during the outbreak, Neu said.
The agency's teams do careful inspections of the hospital's facilities, assessing how air is moving, he said, which can be difficult to accurately do over the phone with people unfamiliar with the technical details of how HVAC systems work.
In one example, an isolation room at a hospital was found to have been pressurized wrongly, with air flowing out of the room with the measles patient, Neu said. Another hospital had skipped a key step in setting up an air filter in their waiting room: unwrapping the filter before turning it on.
"They might say in an interview, 'Yeah, we purchased HEPA filters. They've been running in the waiting room.' But if they're not actually out of the plastic bag, they're not doing what they think they're doing," Neu said.
While Neu remains on the job for now, he received a notice on April 1 warning him to expect to be laid off by HHS in the coming weeks.
"This action is necessary to align our workforce with the agency's current and future needs and to ensure the efficient and effective operation of our programs," Neu's notice from the department said.
Neu said he received the notice while in his hotel room in Texas, as he prepared to return from his deployment. Most of his colleagues and the leadership above him within NIOSH have either been laid off, offered reassignments to other agencies or warned to expect cuts.
"My current understanding is that I'll be working in the office until the end of this month, and then I'll be on 60 days administrative leave until June 30th, and then we'll be separated at that point," he said.
Agency officials scrapped plans to offer future ventilation assessments to Texas, he said, because of the prospect that he might get laid off while in the field and cut off from the agency's systems.
A CDC spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
While much of the work Neu's team does at NIOSH is research, he said that experts on his team have often been tapped to deploy to emergency responses as the agency's primary experts on topics like ventilation and contamination.
He recounted several past deployments, ranging from helping hospitals around the country draw up plans to prepare for
Ebola cases
during the Obama administration, to helping the agency's quarantine station at Detroit's airport build an isolation room to screen passengers early during the COVID-19 pandemic.
"We're involved in pretty much every response the CDC is involved in. Especially if there's some sort of engineering or ventilation component, NIOSH gets called in as that scientific expertise," he said.
The layoffs have also upended other work done by NIOSH to respond to requests like health hazard evaluations, where workplaces can call on the agency for help investigating health issues on the job, like
cancer clusters
or
fungal outbreaks
.
Impact on the
CDC's measles response
also goes beyond NIOSH. CBS News previously reported that multiple agency staff assigned to the effort had been let go.
An official said Tuesday that the CDC was now "scraping to find the resources and personnel needed to provide support" to Texas and other states now facing outbreaks.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
43 minutes ago
- Yahoo
AMA and other medical associations are kicked out of CDC vaccine workgroups
NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. health officials have told more than a half-dozen of the nation's top medical organizations that they will no longer help establish vaccination recommendations. The government told the organizations on Thursday via email that their experts are being disinvited from the workgroups that have been the backbone of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. The organizations include the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Infectious Diseases Society of America. 'I'm concerned and distressed,' said Dr. William Schaffner, a Vanderbilt University vaccine expert who for decades has been involved with ACIP and its workgroups. He said the move will likely propel a confusing fragmentation of vaccine guidance, as patients may hear the government say one thing and hear their doctors say another. One email said the organizations are 'special interest groups and therefore are expected to have a 'bias' based on their constituency and/or population that they represent.' A federal health official on Friday confirmed the action, which was first reported by Bloomberg. The decision was the latest development in what has become a saga involving the ACIP. The committee, created in 1964, makes recommendations to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on how vaccines that have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration should be used. CDC directors have traditionally almost always approved those recommendations, which are widely heeded by doctors and greenlight insurance coverage for shots. U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was a leading voice in the anti-vaccine movement before becoming the U.S. government's top health official, and in June abruptly fired the entire ACIP after accusing them of being too closely aligned with manufacturers. He handpicked replacements that include several vaccine skeptics. The workgroups typically include committee members and experts from medical and scientific organizations. At workgroup meetings, members evaluate data from vaccine manufacturers and the CDC, and formulate vaccination recommendation proposals to be presented to the full committee. The structure was created for several reasons, Schaffner said. The professional groups provide input about what might and might not be possible for doctors to implement. And it helped build respect and trust in ACIP recommendations, having the buy-in of respected medical organizations, he said. Workgroup members are vetted for conflicts of interest, to make sure than no one who had, say, made money from working on a hepatitis vaccine was placed on the hepatitis committee, Schaffner noted. Also disinvited from the groups were the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American College of Physicians, the American Geriatrics Society, the American Osteopathic Association, the National Medical Association and the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases. In a joint statement Friday, the AMA and several of the other organizations said: 'To remove our deep medical expertise from this vital and once transparent process is irresponsible, dangerous to our nation's health, and will further undermine public and clinician trust in vaccines.' They urged the administration to reconsider the move "so we can continue to feel confident in its vaccine recommendations for our patients.' Some of the professional organizations have criticized Kennedy's changes to the ACIP, and three of the disinvited groups last month joined a lawsuit against the government over Kennedy's decision to stop recommending COVID-19 vaccines for most children and pregnant women. In a social media post Friday, one of the Kennedy-appointed ACIP members — Retsef Levi — wrote that the working groups 'will engage experts from even broader set of disciplines!' Levi, a business management professor, also wrote that working group membership 'will be based on merit & expertise — not membership in organizations proven to have (conflicts of interest) and radical & narrow view of public health!' HHS officials have not said which people are going to be added to the ACIP workgroups. ___ The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content. Mike Stobbe, The Associated Press Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Wall Street Journal
an hour ago
- Wall Street Journal
Trump Administration Blocks Funding for CDC Health Programs
WASHINGTON—The Trump administration is blocking funding for a swath of public-health programs run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the latest flashpoint in a push by the White House to withhold money already approved by Congress. The White House Office of Management and Budget issued the directions in a footnote on an appropriations memo this past week, according to people familiar with the matter. A range of programs won't be fully funded under the freeze.
Associated Press
an hour ago
- Associated Press
AMA and other medical associations are kicked out of CDC vaccine workgroups
NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. health officials have told more than a half-dozen of the nation's top medical organizations that they will no longer help establish vaccination recommendations. The government told the organizations on Thursday via email that their experts are being disinvited from the workgroups that have been the backbone of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. The organizations include the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Infectious Diseases Society of America. 'I'm concerned and distressed,' said Dr. William Schaffner, a Vanderbilt University vaccine expert who for decades has been involved with ACIP and its workgroups. He said the move will likely propel a confusing fragmentation of vaccine guidance, as patients may hear the government say one thing and hear their doctors say another. One email said the organizations are 'special interest groups and therefore are expected to have a 'bias' based on their constituency and/or population that they represent.' A federal health official on Friday confirmed the action, which was first reported by Bloomberg. The decision was the latest development in what has become a saga involving the ACIP. The committee, created in 1964, makes recommendations to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on how vaccines that have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration should be used. CDC directors have traditionally almost always approved those recommendations, which are widely heeded by doctors and greenlight insurance coverage for shots. U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was a leading voice in the anti-vaccine movement before becoming the U.S. government's top health official, and in June abruptly fired the entire ACIP after accusing them of being too closely aligned with manufacturers. He handpicked replacements that include several vaccine skeptics. The workgroups typically include committee members and experts from medical and scientific organizations. At workgroup meetings, members evaluate data from vaccine manufacturers and the CDC, and formulate vaccination recommendation proposals to be presented to the full committee. The structure was created for several reasons, Schaffner said. The professional groups provide input about what might and might not be possible for doctors to implement. And it helped build respect and trust in ACIP recommendations, having the buy-in of respected medical organizations, he said. Workgroup members are vetted for conflicts of interest, to make sure than no one who had, say, made money from working on a hepatitis vaccine was placed on the hepatitis committee, Schaffner noted. Also disinvited from the groups were the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American College of Physicians, the American Geriatrics Society, the American Osteopathic Association, the National Medical Association and the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases. In a joint statement Friday, the AMA and several of the other organizations said: 'To remove our deep medical expertise from this vital and once transparent process is irresponsible, dangerous to our nation's health, and will further undermine public and clinician trust in vaccines.' They urged the administration to reconsider the move 'so we can continue to feel confident in its vaccine recommendations for our patients.' Some of the professional organizations have criticized Kennedy's changes to the ACIP, and three of the disinvited groups last month joined a lawsuit against the government over Kennedy's decision to stop recommending COVID-19 vaccines for most children and pregnant women. In a social media post Friday, one of the Kennedy-appointed ACIP members — Retsef Levi — wrote that the working groups 'will engage experts from even broader set of disciplines!' Levi, a business management professor, also wrote that working group membership 'will be based on merit & expertise — not membership in organizations proven to have (conflicts of interest) and radical & narrow view of public health!' HHS officials have not said which people are going to be added to the ACIP workgroups. ___ The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
