Diseases are spreading. The CDC isn’t warning the public like it was months ago

To accomplish its mission of increasing the health security of the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states that it “conducts critical science and provides health information” to protect the nation. But since President Trump’s administration assumed power in January, many of the platforms the CDC used to communicate with the public have gone silent, an NPR analysis found.

Many of the CDC’s newsletters have stopped being distributed, workers at the CDC say. Health alerts about disease outbreaks, previously sent to health professionals subscribed to the CDC’s Health Alert Network, haven’t been dispatched since March. The agency’s main social media channels have come under new ownership of the Department of Health and Human Services, emails reviewed by NPR show, and most have gone more than a month without posting their own new content.

“Public health functions best when its experts are allowed to communicate the work that they do in real time, and that’s not happening,” said Kevin Griffis, who served as the director of communications at the CDC until March. “That could put people’s lives at risk.”

Health emergencies have not paused since January. Cases of measles, salmonella, listeria and hepatitis A and C have spread throughout the country. More than 100 million Americans continue to suffer from chronic diseases like diabetes and breast cancer. The decline in the agency’s communication could put people at risk, said four current and former CDC workers, three of whom NPR is allowing to remain anonymous because they are still employed by the CDC and believe they may be punished for speaking out.

“We are functionally unable to operate communications,” said one of the CDC workers. “We feel like our hands are tied behind our backs.”

Before Trump was inaugurated, the CDC managed most of its communication. HHS, the agency that oversees the CDC and more than 20 divisions and agencies, rarely reviewed the content in CDC social media posts or newsletters, CDC workers said.

That allowed the CDC to communicate quickly and often.

“The whole goal is to say, this is what we know. And here are the best recommendations from experts in the field,” said Dr. Jodie Guest, a professor and senior vice chair of the Department of Epidemiology at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health. “And this is the best advice about the way the general population should handle things in order to protect their health.”

The CDC’s communication staff dispersed health messages weekly, monthly and quarterly through a network of more than 150 newsletters about topics like arthritis, diabetes and food safety. The CDC distributed those newsletters to tens of thousands of subscribers, CDC employees said, including clinicians and laboratories that relied on the information to care for patients.

Facts from those dispatches were often shared on social media. Information from the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the agency’s publication of public health information and recommendations, was regularly posted across the CDC’s main social platforms, like on Facebook and X, formerly Twitter.

Scientists and other communication professionals at the CDC could also suggest other health facts to be posted on the agency’s main platforms. Those sorts of posts included information on X about topics like how COVID-19 was spreading in 2020, posts on Facebook about how to prevent bacterial infections and posts across platforms about how to get screened for chronic illnesses, like cancers.

The messages quickly reached a wide audience. More than 12 million people subscribe to the CDC’s main Facebook, Instagram, X and LinkedIn accounts.

“Social media is one of the main ways the CDC communicates plain language, life-saving messages to America,” said one CDC employee.

But now, many of those messages have stopped being sent out. Changes to communication at the CDC began shortly after Trump was inaugurated in January, when HHS instructed the CDC and other health agencies to pause any sort of collaboration with people outside the agency.

“So at that point we stopped pretty much all communications,” said a CDC employee who works at the agency.

The pause affected some of the CDC’s most essential publications. The CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the agency’s regularly published write-up of important new public health research and disease outbreak information, was not released for two weeks after Trump was inaugurated. No report was published on Jan. 23, the first Friday after the inauguration, or on Jan. 30, the second Friday.

The unprecedented break in publication of the weekly reports concerned some subscribers.

“It stopped publishing at the height of the bird flu outbreak and at the beginning of the measles outbreak,” said Guest, the epidemiology professor at Emory, who said she’s been reading the report every week since she was a graduate student. “And so it’s really a time when we want to get that very consistent and very important and scientifically sound information, and it was all shut down.”

The reports resumed on Friday Feb. 6, around the time workers at the CDC were told they could resume some meetings with external partners, CDC employees said. But the way the facts inside have been shared with the public has not returned to how it was. Communications have not been handled in-house by CDC scientists and communicators like before. All posts that CDC workers want to make to their agency’s social media accounts have to be reviewed by HHS, employees at the CDC said.

“What we’re being told is that, no, your channels aren’t going to go back.” said a CDC employee.

On April 24, some employees were sent an email from a supervisor that confirmed that HHS now owned the CDC’s main social media platforms, including its X, Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook accounts.

“We were also notified that HHS is not accepting content for those channels at this time,” the email added.

In response to a request for comment regarding the changes to communication practices at the CDC, the director of communications at HHS, Andrew Nixon, cast doubt on what the workers said.

“It’s unfortunate to see career officials spreading false rumors,” Nixon replied.

Since HHS approval was instituted as a requirement for posting, almost no newsletters have been sent to the tens of thousands of people who subscribe to them, CDC workers said. The last update sent out by the CDC’s Health Alert Network was regarding the risk of dengue infection on March 18, even though outbreaks of salmonella and listeria were acknowledged in May by the CDC on its website.

When CDC publications have gone out, some have been delayed or missing information. A recent release of CDC data regarding the prevalence of HIV in the U.S. cautioned that it “does not include data on PrEP coverage,” referring to medication taken by individuals to prevent HIV infection. “CDC is unable to resume PrEP coverage at this time, due to a reduction in force affecting the Division of HIV Prevention (DHP).”

Two CDC employees who work in communications told NPR that fewer than half of the public health posts they’ve sent to HHS for approval have been cleared for publication on social media. Even posts that include basic information about recent disease outbreaks, like the number of people sickened or hospitalized, have not been posted as requested by employees, NPR confirmed after reviewing posts submitted for approval by an employee. Communications workers say they are also suggesting fewer health posts because they anticipate that their posts will be rejected.

“Everything is getting bottlenecked at the top,” said a worker. “It is extraordinarily time-consuming and backlogs us by weeks, if not months.”

The consequences could be deadly, experts said.

“When you have an outbreak of something like listeria, if you are a person who is pregnant and you consume food items that might have listeria in it that CDC should be warning you about, you run the risk of the baby that you are carrying dying,” said Guest. “And so that information needs to get out there.”

“Propaganda” instead of public health

On April 1, thousands of federal health workers were laid off as part of the government’s “reduction in force.” Communication professionals at the CDC were not spared. Almost everyone at the CDC whose primary job was to communicate with the press was laid off, in addition to almost everyone whose job it was to provide records to the public. Every member of the CDC’s division of digital media was also told their jobs would be eliminated, workers at the CDC said.

“All the points of contact that we generally rely on to communicate with the American people have either been eliminated or dramatically reduced,” said Griffis, the former CDC communications director.

Removing all the CDC’s web developers, graphic designers and social media staffers simultaneously caused a problem. The CDC was suddenly locked out of its main social media accounts, said three people close to the situation.

“The passwords to those accounts were kept on a password protected Word doc,” said one worker at the CDC. “And that Word doc was inaccessible for anyone left, because all of the people that could have opened that document were fired.”

Most of the main accounts haven’t posted since the CDC’s digital media team was laid off. During March, the CDC’s main Facebook page posted more than 20 times—sometimes twice a day. The posts included information for pregnant women about how to take care of their developing babies and screenings for colorectal cancer.

The only main CDC account that has posted some content since April 1 is the CDC’s account on X, a platform owned by Elon Musk. He oversaw the Department of Government Efficiency, the organization that spearheaded efforts to lay off tens of thousands of workers across federal agencies.

On April 7, workers at the CDC said they were surprised to see the CDC’s main X account post a tweet for the first time in a week.

“Secretary Kennedy’s directive is for CDC to lead the nation in health readiness and response,” the post stated, sharing a message from Kennedy’s own X account about his visit to Gaines County, Texas. “His visit to Texas Sunday, to support the state’s efforts to control the measles outbreak, resulted in discussions with Texas state health officials to deploy another CDC response team to the area to further assist with the state’s efforts to protect its citizens against measles and its complications.”

No one they knew had drafted the message, the CDC employees said. Compared to the science and health information that had traditionally been posted to the accounts, three of the current workers at the CDC that NPR spoke with said they considered the post about Kennedy to be akin to “propaganda.”

Griffis, the former communications director, said there’s nothing wrong with retweeting a cabinet secretary.

“What’s undermines the credibility of CDC communications moving forward is the near cessation of pro-vaccination and apolitical public health messages in favor of messages that amplify the secretary,” he said. “That makes it a political channel.”

Since posting about Kennedy’s visit to Texas in early April, the CDC’s main X account has re-posted two more tweets from Kennedy’s account and re-posted one tweet from the HHS X account, which contradicted a CBS News story. On May 14, the account posted about a recent decline in overdose deaths. By comparison, during the month of April last year, in 2024, the CDC’s main X account posted more than 90 times, offering advice and information about topics like alcohol use, a salmonella outbreak, COVID-19 vaccines and wastewater surveillance.

The director of communications at HHS confirmed that the CDC is not locked out of its X account.

“The CDC has access to their X account – it’s that simple,” Nixon said. “CDC is an agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and supports Secretary Kennedy’s vision to protect public health and Make America Healthy Again.”

Nixon did not respond to a request for comment regarding whether the CDC was still locked out of its other main social media accounts.

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