CDC officials’ resignation emails
105 comments
·August 28, 2025CMay
Is this about the upcoming reveal of the autism findings, or is the article just feeding that as the cause?
I thought the understanding for base rates of autism was that people are living longer and starting their lives later. Becoming financially stable later, having children later. Having children later rather than earlier significantly increased the risk of autism.
After that then the question becomes about intensity of autistic symptoms, where the base rate of autistic children makes sense given the data, but the intensity and thus increased likelihood of seeking diagnosis may be increasing as a second factor which sits on top of expanded diagnosis standards.
For intensity, there are suggestions that maybe obesity, plastics/chemicals could be contributing, but it sounded like there wasn't enough data on it.
I'm not sure what other answer they found. RFK has said he doesn't think people should follow his personal health advice. He knows he's neither a scientist or a doctor and supposedly there was some team of scientists working on it. I'm not prejudging that they can't have arrived at some useful result, but it's obviously very politicized.
magicalist
> Is this about the upcoming reveal of the autism findings, or is the article just feeding that as the cause?
No, it's almost certainly about vaccine science and recommendations. Hence all the other resignations today.
(though who knows, maybe RFKjr will really go for it and bring back full-throated vaccines==autism next week)
beefnugs
I think more important than most of the specifics here is how Dump is choosing government appointees: Someone who is terrible at whatever job they are given, and the public proclamation that "no one should take my advice" is an acceptable statement.
Wouldn't it be better that he at least says shit like, "as we ramp up militarization, killing and removing all the foreigners will get less germs in the air, aheeyuk" Like he is trying at a bare minimum brain level at the job?
vkou
It's a crying shame that given the choice, the voters picked the modern-day equivalent of Lysenkoism[1].
[1] Which due to the timing of its adoption and abandonment did avoid outright causing famines in the Soviet Union... And went on to kill tens of millions of people in China.
voidfunc
The inability for intelligent people to frame their policies and positions in ways very stupid simple people can understand is the biggest failing of the last 50+ years if not longer.
mankyd
> in ways very stupid simple people can understand
The problem is rarely the ability to understand. It is the ability (or desire) to listen that many lack.
voidfunc
These people have no trouble listening. They're deeply into people like Rogan, Trump, their pastor, RFK etc. and eat up their every word.
Gigachad
The problem seems to be that Americans are willing to suffer a lot of personal loss as long as they can ensure someone else suffers even more.
yahway
Hypocrisy at its finest.
o11c
At this point, I don't think it's an inability - all sorts of messages get broadcast - but an unwillingness to actually talk to people with different worldviews.
The easy way to spread a pro-health message to the people who really need to comply with it is to say "letting disease spread is Nergal worship (2 Kings 17:30), and America is a Christian nation." Just spam that, nonstop, until it is as embedded in their minds as whatever derangement Trump has come up with this time - because this is the kind of thing they respond to.
The second thing is more complicated: to admit that a lot of "sexual health" only applies to people engaging in highly risky behavior, and should be handled separately both in messaging and in practice from general health. You can still make them support it, but with an explicit "do good even to the sinner" messaging. Throw in a few "We are currently promoting abortion because free school lunches have been canceled" and you WILL see movement.
Both of these are considered abominable among the current Democrat party, because it involves speaking the language of people with different values.
vkou
Why would they listen to nonsense that makes them uncomfortable, as opposed to their expressed preference of listening to nonsense that makes them comfortable?
It doesn't matter how much you cite Matthew 19:24 to someone who already had their brain rotted by, say, prosperity gospel. They don't give a shit.
michaelmrose
It is odd to see someone in a society which worships willful ignorance and aggressive stupidy advance the position that somehow the smart people are responsible for not having figured a way to force the morons to a position that they have no intention of occupying.
They believe that the set of values and beliefs that they hold true or false advantage them and perceive education as an attack on their values. Most if them are happy to degrade and diminish anyone who tries some are willing to murder.
yongjik
> The inability for intelligent people to frame their policies and positions in ways very stupid simple people can understand
"disease very bad. disease may kill. inject this. you less likely to get disease."
=> "How dare you infringe upon my bodily freedom!"
Realistically, how farther down can we dumb things from here?
michaelmrose
You can't people that stupid shouldn't actually get a vote in the matter.
jiggawatts
> "disease very bad. disease may kill. inject this. you less likely to get disease."
The actual argument is that by everyone getting injected, society as a whole crosses a threshold where viruses fail to spread exponentially and don't cause pandemics.
It's a more nuanced, more complex reason that some (incredibly selfish) people are just unable to grasp.
"Why would I ever a tiny personal risk to stop other people getting sick!?" was a very common argument during the COVID pandemic.
SantalBlush
Personal responsibility applies to improving and maintaining one's own intellect, and not relying on others to do it.
krapp
I think the bigger failing in that regard is the educational system. There shouldn't be this many stupid people, and they shouldn't be this stupid.
acdha
It’s a big mistake to thing of people as stupid: they’d be far less dangerous if they actually were.
The problem isn’t lack of intelligence but the information space they inhabit and the feeling that they have somehow been mistreated. There’s an entire genre of “why are leopards eating my face?” schadenfreude posts about MAGAs asking why Trump is doing some “surprising” thing he said he was going to do for years. Because they’re _not_ stupid, once they’ve thrown in with a side they’ll put a lot of effort into coming up with rationalizations or attacks to try to “balance” things out. The bitter grievances are really powerful because they let people talk themselves into seeing things as necessary sacrifices: sure, you’re losing Medicaid and paying more in taxes but the alternative is living in a world where Riley Gaines was forced to tie for fifth so I guess you just have to tighten your belt on behalf of female athletes.
martythemaniak
Yeah, nothing Trump has done has been particular surprising, but the enthusiasm with which huge portions of America have welcomed or shrugged at his insa has been the real shocker.
estearum
IMO there's a small (very) enthusiastic portion of America, then a much larger portion that simply didn't like inflation and would've voted any incumbent out of power. Very poor timing that has already caused generational damage, at least.
etchalon
We are not a smart country.
hyperliner
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ants_everywhere
One of the many parallels of this administration with communism
dralley
morkalork
And this was written before the USA took a 10% stake in Intel, turning it into a Chinese style state-owned enterprise!
CamperBob2
No kidding. Can you imagine how conservatives would have reacted if the banners going up around DC[1] had Obama's face on them?
1: https://bsky.app/profile/donmoyn.bsky.social/post/3lxfamzutk...
Terr_
> the modern-day equivalent of Lysenkoism
Another communist parallel: MAGA is aimed in the general direction of a Great Leap Forward [0] to screw over the American economy and industry with incompetent autarky, and also a Cultural Revolution [1] for persecuting "woke elites" (subject-matter experts) leading to international brain-drain.
I really hope the American people can put the brakes on that, because it took China decades to recover.
ajross
> It's a crying shame that given the choice, the voters picked the modern-day equivalent of Lysenkoism[1].
Those voters (who needless to say had never heard of Lysenko) were told by trusted, well-spoken, authoritative, legitimate seeming sources that this was a mainstream position and a very reasonable one. The people who needed to say it was bullshit were deliberately excluded.
And yeah, that applies specifically to Fox News and Facebook, but also to Rogan and the manosphere, and to 4chan.
And to HN, quite frankly. If you want to know why people turned away from science just go back and watch the discourse around late COVID or whatever. And note how it was utterly dominated by the loons in throwaway accounts. Some of us tried fighting back and ended up incessantly flagged and rate-limited, so we gave up. "Reasonable" HN posters fled the field in favor of bland tech discussion (or retreated in the face of "moderation"), and someone looking at the issue without context might assume that the modern Lysenkos must have had a point.
protocolture
Modern social media teaches you to either engage if the topic gives you happy brain feels, or disengage completely so it never shows up in your feed. The more you "fight" a cause, the more you promote it and the more you see it.
ajross
FWIW HN doesn't have personalized feeds like that. We all see the same front page. But regardless:
The loons loved it indeed, and it was all over the front page. Right here. Blaming that on the rest of us seems ridiculous, but sort of besides the point. I don't care about blame, I'm saying that whoever you want to blame, it is us, right here, on HN, not some abstract "voters". We made this problem. We told people that masks didn't work and vaccines were poison. If not you and I personally, people writing prose in proxy for us did.
On balance, Hacker News stood solidly on the side of RFK2 and against the CDC in this particular war. It just did.
hyperliner
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CamperBob2
The good news, at least, is that next week there's a chance we'll finally get to the bottom of the whole autism thing! https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-trump-claims-we-...
Seriously. If you voted for this, you owe civilization a debt that you will probably never be wealthy enough or long-lived enough to repay.
ornornor
It’s hard to believe how much closer to Idiocracy the US is getting every day. I love how they quoted what RFK and Trump have said in the article to show how devoid of any substance any of that is.
enjeyw
I have no reasonable theory as to how Trump/RFK will be able to reveal credible information about Autism that wasn’t already available from public research papers.
adastra22
I believe he was being sarcastic, although tone is hard to read online.
enjeyw
Yeah on re-read I think you’re right. Though who knows in this day and age!
dataflow
If it's not credible, at least it will be incredible.
pplante
As an autistic person with 3 kids with ASD, I get triggered by this bullshit nearly daily. I sincerely hope that whatever "reveal" they have planned does not further harm our ability to access the early interventions that my kids are benefiting from.
ants_everywhere
It will be nothing. He has already made it clear he doesn't even know what autism is.
CamperBob2
He doesn't know what tariffs are, either, but did that stop him?
Insanity
Not to be pessimistic, but I’m pretty sure that whatever they do will do more harm than good, given how much of a hot mess the current administration is.
crooked-v
I think it's more likely that it will be used as an excuse to actively harm and oppress autistic people and anyone else they can use pseudoscience to try to label as 'damaged' or 'unnatural', rather than merely taking away existing aid.
morkalork
Welp, better hope they don't decide it's a heritable condition that can only be solved via sterilization programs! Because that has absolutely happened before in North America.
juanani
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aaron695
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amazingamazing
[flagged]
throwawaymaths
Remember when the CDC started tracking gun violence as an "epidemic"? Surely someone should but the CDC doing so is clearly outside of its charter. That was one major moment that betrayed the CDC becoming a political and not a scientific organization
ceejayoz
Help me understand how gunshot wounds have nothing to do with public health?
They study the other common forms of death/injury. If anything, giving guns a special exemption from scrutiny is the political move.
unsnap_biceps
The mental health of the perpetrator is also a public health concern and could fairly be considered a epidemic
null
throwawaymaths
Plenty of other organizations public and private already handling this issue. No need to waste funds on it. Anything less is a dangerous distraction for the CDC which really needs to focus on its core competency -- protecting the us from pathogenic threats. Should the department of HUD send rockets to space? Of course not.
lubujackson
Don't have a dog in this race, but were they also tracking deatha from auto accidents and the like? Because if it was part of a big pie chart of how people die, then no problem. If it was specifically only about guns, then it was political.
DoctorOetker
Is work an epidemic? At what rate do people die or get injured at work?
robbiewxyz
To add to other comments, gun violence has a massive mental health component for which preventative treatment can save many lives. Of course it warrants study!
And given the well-documented copycat-killer phenomenon, modeling it similarly to an epidemic is very reasonable.
random3
So better throw the baby with the bath water and not have CDC then have CDC treat gun violence or suicides as an epidemic, yes?
throwawaymaths
No. I'm just pointing out the disingenuity of CDC officials claiming their entity isn't political. There may have been a time when it wasn't. But it hasn't been for a while, the US has been in lower case d democratic administrative decline for long before Trump got into power.
jaybrendansmith
Great timing with this comment, as 20 children are shot in a church.
specialist
What is your threshold for epidemic?
Does 47,000 deaths per year (13.7 per 100,000) not qualify?
Why are you even complaining (trolling)? After decades of pressure, the gun lobby (NRA, GOA, etc) has finally eliminated CDC's role in researching gun violence.
Is outright victory insufficient? Must you continue to belabor the point?
wakawaka28
Are these the people responsible for trying to force an vaccine on everyone that started off ineffective and became useless within months, under threat of exile for anyone questioning the program, and encouraging censorship of critics online? If so, they do not belong in government anyway. I hope they may they find some other way to use their medical "expertise" far away from me.
keb_
The CDC is and always has been unable to force anyone to get a vaccine. You might be confusing the CDC with your elementary school principal.
add-sub-mul-div
Whatever this condition is is much worse than long covid.
CamperBob2
Call it "Long Stupid."
wakawaka28
The condition is called awareness, and yes it is painful every single day. I can't even talk about it here without getting swamped with nonsense from people who do not share my condition.
refurb
Indeed. The absolutely cluster that the CDC covid response is enough reason to clear house.
I hope these people are able to find other ways to protect the public from disease, even if not at CDC.
I respect their decisions, but our country deeply needs scientists so committed to the Hippocratic oath that they’d rather resign than contribute to endangering public safety.
Those who do not seek power are most fit to hold it.
I have nothing really to say other than this is saddening to read.