“Inside the Fall of the CDC” was based on hundreds of leaked emails, internal CDC documents and interviews with more than 30 current CDC employees and administration officials who witnessed the transformation of the world’s premier public health organization into an agent of propaganda to the shame of its staff: “The cowardice and the caving are disgusting to me,” one CDC veteran told us.
Many reporters were documenting discrete examples of the Trump administration’s meddling with science. But we wanted to tell a story that was at once more intimate and more consequential: What did it mean when the world’s premier public health agency lost the public’s trust? What was it like for career scientists to face unfathomable moral quandaries, ordered to go along with Trump administration directives that ran counter to everything they believed? We wanted to take readers inside as some scientists rebelled and others quietly acquiesced even though they knew their actions could cost lives. And we wanted readers to understand how this loss of trust could, and arguably already has, influenced vital decisions by Americans, such as whether to be vaccinated.
As we pursued our investigative narrative, we had to hang tough as bits of our reporting were broken off by other news outlets (torture). We were committed to reporting not just that something happened, but how and why it happened – and who allowed it. We wanted to be in the room and we were. Our resulting story was filled with exclusive details and scoops:
– The story took readers for the first time inside the lab that made the CDC’s worst mistake in 74 years: the flawed COVID test kits. ProPublica was the first to reveal that the lab’s leader sent tests to state and local public health labs even though a quality check by his staff warned they might not work. Using a trove of secret records and weeks of exhaustive interviews with lab scientists, ProPublica translated complex technical details into a clearly worded narrative that revealed details that were previously unknown even to top CDC officials. Within hours of publication, the CDC shut down that lab. This remains the most authoritative and complete account of the fiasco to date. NPR’s story ran more than three weeks after ours.
– There were exclusive accounts of extraordinary clashes between politics and science. The Associated Press and the Post wrote about White House meddling with guidance on churches, including the removal of a warning that choirs could spread COVID-19. But we captured the anguished resistance and the capitulation of the head of the CDC’s coronavirus response, who told his staff, “I am very troubled on this Sunday morning that there will be people who will get sick and perhaps die because of what we were forced to do.”
– Competitors broke news about outbreaks on cruise ships and the closing of the border with Mexico. But none took readers inside to witness the actual events that led to those decisions and the agony of Dr. Martin Cetron, the CDC leader who waged losing battles to prevent the misuse of his agency’s powers. “I will not be a part of this,” a furious Cetron told a colleague as the Trump administration used the CDC’s quarantine authority to deport refugee children. His failures to block the administration’s use of the CDC’s quarantine powers to turn away thousands of children at the border with Mexico and, separately, to allow cruise ships to continue to sail came to symbolize the agency’s weakened state.
– ProPublica was the first to report on why the CDC’s chief of staff quit. A political appointee and former GOP operative, Kyle McGowan hit his breaking point when CDC Director Robert Redfield ordered him to stop the deportation of a dog at a time when the Trump administration was using the CDC’s powers to deport children at the border with Mexico.