The CDC is Dead

Where do we turn?

I know exactly how to frame this. It is not nice.

Herodotus relates¹ that in ancient Egypt, the bodies of the wives of men of rank were left for a few days before being handed over to the embalmers, to prevent ‘abuse’. Based on what has happened to the ragged corpse of the CDC, I don’t think this delaying tactic would put off modern anti-vax nutjobs for a moment. RFK Jr, renowned for leaving a decaying baby bear in Central Park years ago² has now had his way with the CDC, reviving it to lurch around zombie-like, biting people with misinformation.

If the preceding, chaotic metaphor turns your stomach, this is appropriate. It reflects the state of what is laughably called ‘health care’ in the United States of America at present.

The CDC is now Anti-vax

A few days ago, the CDC made its ‘Autism and Vaccines’ page anti-vax.³ They resuscitate the zombie claim that “vaccines do not cause autism is not evidence-based”, highlight conspiracy theories about “supportive studies being ignored” and claim they are going to look into “potential causal links”. This is all bullshit.

The assertion of a ‘link’ between vaccines and autism started as a well-documented scam by Andrew Wakefield, who fabricated the ‘association’ for personal profit. The article he published in the Lancet has thus been withdrawn, and he has been censured by the British GMC. The provenance of the idea is nonsense. In addition, no substantial study provides any evidence of a link between vaccines and autism, and large studies have repeatedly failed to show any association. If you want a brief overview of the Wakefield case (in a clear, comic-book format, for 21^st century audiences) you could do worse than read Daryl Cunningham’s The facts in the Case of Dr Andrew Wakefield, available here.⁴

The CDC warned us about this!

In 2011, when the CDC put up its Zombie Apocalypse webpage the website crashed, unable to cope with the surge in public interest. The page is now taken down. Fortunately, a copy was mummified on the Wayback Machine. The former CDC Public Health Matters Blog informs us that:

The word zombie comes from Haitian and New Orleans voodoo origins. Although its meaning has changed slightly over the years, it refers to a human corpse mysteriously reanimated to serve the undead.

This seems to fit the current state of administration at the US Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) so well that one wonders whether it should be renamed the “US Department of Health & Zombie Services” (HZS)?

After going through the basics of (a) putting together an emergency kit; and (b) formulating your emergency plan, they ironically reassure us that:

If zombies did start roaming the streets, CDC would conduct an investigation much like any other disease outbreak. CDC would provide technical assistance to cities, states, or international partners dealing with a zombie infestation. This assistance might include consultation, lab testing and analysis, patient management and care, tracking of contacts, and infection control (including isolation and quarantine).

It seems that the CDC can’t even manage measles (the US is on the way to having its ‘measles-free’ status withdrawn next January), so this rings rather hollow. Especially now.

What should we do?

Copies of documents live on after their writers have departed.⁵ Previously, the CDC would have determined the cause of the illness, the source of the infection, identified modes of transmission, and broken the cycle of infection, preventing further cases. We still can.

We know the sources: anti-vax nut jobs like RFK Jr and manifestly evil purveyors of misinformation for profit, like Andrew Wakefield. We have identified the mode of transmission: viral spread of misinformation on the Internet and in unreliable media, affecting vulnerable people, especially those ignorant of how Science works. Those infected are obvious from their lurching intellectual gait and zombie anti-vax gurgles. We need to:

1. Isolate the sources of infection.

2. Suppress the vectors of infection.

3. Make sure that we don’t become infected, relying instead on solid, well-thought-out information provided by reputable sources. We need to vaccinate ourselves, not just against communicable diseases, but also against communicable misinformation.

The CDC is no longer a reliable source of information. We do however still have a multiplicity of reliable people like Your Local Epidemiologist (Katelyn Jetelina, pictured above), who has recently lamented the “flatlining of part of the CDC”.⁶ It’s likely that the World Health Organisation, its Vaccine Safety Net, the European Vaccine Information Portal, the 67,000 pediatricians at The American Academy of Pediatrics and the Mayo Clinic will continue to provide reliable vaccine information for some time yet.

Regrettably, the only sure-fire way of killing a zombie lurching towards you is to shoot it in the head. In this case, metaphorically, of course.⁷

My 2c, Dr Jo.

The caricature at the start was initially generated by Ideogram, and then modified using Nanobanana. Google Gemini struggled to change the awkward way ‘RFK Jr’ is holding the syringe, but in retrospect, this may be appropriate.

1. See e.g. the translated passage by Macaulay; noting that Herodotus is merely relating what he heard. We have no independent evidence that this practice was widespread, nor that the stated concerns were well-founded.

2. This was widely reported in 2024, for example by NPR.

3. Here’s a screen grab of the page header:

Here’s the response of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health:

4. Trump’s America has enthusiastically embraced Wakefield. This is a chap who subjected children to procedures that were not indicated, collected blood samples from children at his son’s birthday party and later joked about this, misled the Lancet about his financial involvement, and was struck off by the United Kingdom’s General Medical Council. Analyses make it clear that this bit of evil resulted in a vast amount of negative media attention to the mumps, measles and rubella (MMR) vaccine, and was followed by a huge wave of negative sentiment about vaccines. Despite the unfounded nature of his claims, they were soon followed by published studies that refuted the link. Vast amounts of money and time have been wasted on this zombie that refuses to die in the minds of susceptible victims.

5. Unfortunately books can also be rewritten, so read carefully. Photos can be photoshopped. Such modification has happened throughout history, even before Photoshop, and especially in countries where autocrats flourished. The classical example is of course the USSR. Take these images of Lenin giving a speech:

The original picture is on the left. On the right, Trotsky has been airbrushed out of existence. I’m sure we’ll see more and more of this in the US Gilead, as it degenerates even further in its current trajectory towards a complete, fascist autocracy.

6. Tread carefully too. It’s a little unfortunate that (at the time of writing) sites like VaccineInformation.org still list the CDC as their number one source. Likewise for my local (New Zealand) Te Whatu Ora site. Some updates may be required.

7. We don’t want to become even vaguely like the current president of the US, who in his zombie-like trance is convinced that anyone who advocates upholding the law should be, uhh, executed. You can’t make this shit up!