The Purge of Public Health: Retaliation with a Side of Recklessness

This wasn’t a clerical error. It was a political hit job.

More than 1,300 CDC employees—lab specialists, disease trackers, and epidemiologists—were abruptly fired on October 11, 2025. Days later, about half were reinstated after officials blamed a “coding error.” The story keeps changing, but the outcome doesn’t. America’s public-health defenses are being dismantled in plain sight.

Weaponizing Chaos

No one issued a memo saying “fire the Democrats,” but the intention is hard to miss. The firings took place during a government shutdown, a convenient moment for political payback disguised as fiscal discipline.

Remember when CDC Director Susan Monarez was removed after refusing to rewrite vaccine guidance to fit the party line? People with a moral compass are always the first to go.

This isn’t reform. It’s retaliation. “Coding error” is simply an official term for “we got caught.”

MAHA: The Un-Wellness Wing

“Make America Healthy Again” serves as the marketing arm for this agenda. Its leaders are reviving long-debunked claims that autism is caused by vaccines or Tylenol, and for good measure, tossing in circumcision. Because apparently, blaming parents for their children’s neurology is easier than confronting systemic failure.

And autism isn’t the only target. Any condition that challenges a fantasy of genetic perfection gets recast as personal failure. This is what passes for “public health policy” in a movement that also thinks poverty is a lifestyle choice.

When Expertise Becomes The Enemy

The CDC is part of the nation’s security infrastructure. It tracks outbreaks, coordinates responses, and maintains the readiness that keeps the country stable. When those functions collapse, the consequences are immediate: slower detection, fragmented communication, and unnecessary loss of life.

But what should anyone expect from a leader who, in his first term as president, dismantled America’s global virus-tracking programs, downplayed the threat of COVID, insisted it would vanish on its own, and publicly mused about disinfectant injections and bright light as possible cures?

Public-health systems aren’t plug-and-play. When you purge their experts, you erase institutional memory and capacity. What replaces it isn’t innovation; it’s improvisation. And improvisation in crisis costs lives.

Every household and community in this country relies on a functional CDC, whether they realize it or not. The agency doesn’t check your voter registration before tracking an outbreak.

The Bottom Line

You don’t strengthen a nation by firing the people who protect it. You don’t defend freedom by destroying the systems that make it possible.

“America First” is the perfect falsehood: a slogan that paradoxically puts Americans last. And now that same mentality has crept into public health. When you push junk science that blames parents for autism and defund the offices that protect students with disabilities, you’re not promoting health. You’re reviving a worldview that decides who deserves help and who doesn’t.

The result is always the same. Lives are quietly written off as expendable.