The CDC Needed a Thorough Housecleaning to Restore Trust
How did the CDC lose its way—and can it be saved? IMA President and Chief Medical Officer Dr. Joseph Varon shares his thoughts in a new op-ed in The Hill.
“As a doctor who has dedicated my life to saving patients, I will not stand silent. The American people deserve a CDC worthy of its name, that works harder to control diseases than it does to control narratives.” — Dr. Joseph Varon, IMA President and Chief Medical Officer
For 715 consecutive days — every single day — I put on full protective gear in the ICU at Houston’s United Memorial Medical Center, fighting COVID-19 on the frontlines. I never took a day off, because when lives hang in the balance, doctors don’t get the luxury of excuses. We act. We fight. We serve.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was created to serve with that same urgency — to protect Americans from infectious disease through science, transparency and rapid response. But what the public got instead during the pandemic was an agency more obsessed with narratives and control than with saving lives.
During the pandemic, the CDC didn’t just make mistakes — it fundamentally betrayed its mission. It manipulated data, censored debate and colluded with Big Tech to silence dissenting physicians. That isn’t science — that’s politics and narrative-control masquerading as public health, and it comes at a dear cost to this nation.
That’s why HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy must enact a forceful and immediate, top-to-bottom house cleaning.
Consider just a few of the documented failures.
The CDC released COVID-19 test kits with internally known fundamental defects, contributing to catastrophic delays in detecting the virus.
It shifted guidance back and forth on whether to require masks — not based on any evidence but under political pressure. This helped destroy public trust.
Then there’s the data manipulation — at least 25 documented statistical errors, 80 percent of them exaggerating the severity of the pandemic.
The agency suppressed transparency, refusing to release full vaccine injury data because the public “might misinterpret it.”
It colluded in censorship, training Facebook, X, and Google employees to erase posts from experienced physicians who challenged CDC orthodoxy.
It surveilled U.S. citizens, buying massive location-tracking databases to monitor lockdown compliance.
It also buried risk data, scrubbing evidence of myocarditis risk from the vaccine and overcounting child deaths from the virus. This fueled destructive school closures and unnecessary child masking.
These are not minor missteps. They represent institutional malpractice — an agency actively choosing political control over scientific honesty. It has cost countless lives.
Even as frontline doctors treated wave after wave of patients, the CDC insulated itself behind bureaucratic walls, doubling down on arrogance and ideology. Instead of humbly correcting course, the agency turned inward, obsessed with power and control.
The result? Americans no longer know if they can trust the very institution designed to protect them. Public health depends on trust. Once lost, it is nearly impossible to rebuild.
Again, that’s why Kennedy must take bold action now, at this juncture, to restore integrity. That means purging the political operatives and career bureaucrats who turned the CDC into a fortress of ideology. It means bringing in real doctors —leaders with actual hands-on clinical experience, not detached administrators or partisan activists. It means requiring full, unredacted release of all data — good, bad or inconvenient.
In short, to rebuild trust, Kennedy must make sure the CDC is putting patients and science first, not politics and profit.
The CDC desperately needs leaders who understand their first duty is not to narratives, not to politicians, and not to authority or control, but to the health and well-being of the American people.
The CDC’s failures during the COVID-19 pandemic were not just bureaucratic errors. They were betrayals that cost lives, undermined freedom and shattered trust. Unless we act now, the next public health crisis will expose an even weaker, more distrusted CDC — one that Americans may simply ignore from the outset.
As a doctor who has dedicated my life to saving patients, I will not stand silent. The American people deserve a CDC worthy of its name, that works harder to control diseases than it does to control narratives.
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How'd CDC lose its way? Pink Floyd said it best in their song "MONEY!"
I will never trust them again no matter what