Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - The Public Health Internet Is Crumbling

Episode Date: July 30, 2025

Buy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 https://www.usermag.co The internet has become the primary way that people get public health information. Especially since the pandemic began in 2020, millions of people have turned to platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and newsletters to keep up to date on things like food recalls, infectious disease reports, and more. But now, CDC social media channels have gone dark, and the agency's public health communication across the internet is being cut off and dismantled. Chiara Eisner is an investigative reporter at NPR and she's been covering the fiasco at the CDC. We talk about the crucial role that the internet plays in public health and why what's happening right now under Trump and RFK and why it might set us back decades. Follow me:https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz3.0 https://www.tiktok.com/@taylorlorenz

Everyone I spoke to was very hesitant to say they were even glad to have their jobs back. Since the rise of social media, the internet has become the primary way that people get information about public health. Especially since the pandemic began in 2020, millions of people have turned to platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and newsletters to keep up to date on things like food recalls, infectious disease reports, and more. Under Biden, the CDC had radically scaled, back their communications. They rolled out misleading maps that downplayed COVID's danger and cut back on educating the public about the ongoing pandemic. But when Trump took office, things fell off a cliff. CDC social media channels have gone dark and public health communication across the internet is being

cut off and dismantled. Kiarra Eisner is an investigative reporter at NPR and she's been covering all of this. Today, we're going to talk about the crucial role that the internet plays in public health and why what's happening right now under Trump and RFK might set us back decades. Kiarah, welcome. Thank you for having me. Okay, so you are investigative health journalists and you've covered the CDC for a while. How does the CDC operate in normal times? And what do they normally do in terms of communication about public health?

Yeah. So communication is a critical part of public health. It's kind of the public part of public health. The whole point is making sure that. the science reaches people. And normally, the CDC has different avenues where they try to reach people. They have newsletters. They have a weekly morbidity and mortality report that they send out.

And that's kind of like the front page of the CDC, where they publish the latest science. That's not read by the general public. So the way that they reach the general public is through social media. They have more than 12 million followers across different platforms. Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram. And before the inauguration, they were using those platforms daily to let people know about things like getting tested for cancer, getting screened, risks of pregnancy. And if there was an outbreak, the Twitter or X would be one of the places where they would

put essential information for people to know about a Listeria outbreak or a salmonella outbreak or a measles outbreak. and an average person could subscribe to the CDC on their social media and hear those sorts of things. And then they also put stuff on their website. Yeah, I feel like they are doing multiple layers of communication because there's communication to the scientific community. They're putting out data, information for experts. I think I follow them on Instagram maybe, but you know, you get information about, like you said, a recall or really critical information that you might not know about some new disease. When monkeypox was spreading, I think I first heard about it from the CDC.

social media. As anybody that follows me knows, I have many issues with the CDC and kind of, I wish they would do more public health communication around, you know, diseases like COVID and just airborne disease generally. But they sort of started to change strategy after Trump took office. So what happened in the immediate weeks following Trump? What changes did you see in terms of the way the CDC was suddenly communicating with the public? Changes started immediately. So that essential publication, the morbidity and mortality weekly report, that stopped for two. weeks after Trump was inaugurated. And that was the first way people noticed that there was something different going on. After that happened, there was a communications pause and employees were told not to communicate anything. Since then, the pause has been lifted. But I spoke to multiple CDC employees who told me that the pause has not been lifted, that they are absolutely being censored in a couple of different ways. What does that sort of censored? look like? So there are a couple of things that are happening. One, HHS Department of Health and Human Services has now officially taken over the CDC's social media accounts. That is brand new.

Under previous administrations, the CDC had control over their social media accounts. Now they have to submit posts to somebody at HHS seek permission and 50% of the time or more they don't receive that permission, I'm told. They're asking permission to post basic facts about outbreaks that are happening now, like Listeria, Salmonella, we've got a measles outbreak, there's bird flu still happening, and before posting information about people who are sick or dying would not be controversial. That would absolutely go on the CDC's main account immediately. Now there's a bottleneck on those posts, and the posts aren't going to the CDC's main accounts at all. Why would this be, do you think?

I mean, do you think it's just sort of like administrative backup, or do people at these agencies feel like it's politically driven? And under, you know, RFK Jr's HHS, that he doesn't want them to communicate certain things about certain diseases? The workers that I spoke to absolutely feel like it is politically driven. Multiple employees use the word propaganda to describe what the X, profile of the CDC looks like now. If you go to the X profile of the CDC, you will see that all kind of normal posting stopped at the end of March. And since then, it's posted only a handful of

times, even though before that account posted sometimes multiple times a day. And the content that is now being retweeted is almost exclusively RFK tweets that he's made on his own account. And recently, there was a post that denigrated the news, said that Politico, New York Times, and the Washington Post was, quote, wrong again. Those are posts that employees told me would never have been on the channel before. They used that channel to give the public information about diseases, tell them how they could get a vaccine, tell them what they should be doing to avoid Listeria. And it is not being used for those purposes now. It's being used to share. what the secretary is doing, which the employees told me is not the point of those channels. The secretary has his own channel that he can use. And that's always been the case as well. Yeah, it feels really weird to me when I looked at it just how much they're promoting RFK Jr. Like, it seems like they're using these government accounts, as you said that were previously communication tools as purely just a vehicle for his personal PR.

Yes, that's absolutely correct. And we're only talking about the X account, because that appears to be the only one that HHS is using to discuss anything related to the CDC. When you say the only one, you mean the only social media account, as in they've shut down their Facebook, they're not using Instagram, all these other channels have gone dark. Yes. So I want to make clear that it's the main CDC accounts. There are other more minor CDC accounts on social media that speak for various divisions of the CDC. And some of those are posting. They have something in the range. of 30,000 followers.

That is nothing compared to the millions of followers on Facebook. At the CDC main account on Facebook has more than four million followers right now. And that account hasn't posted a single thing since the end of March. And that's because on April 1st, thousands of employees at the CDC were placed on administrative leave,

and that included the entire digital media team. On the digital media team were people who manage social media, They were the web designers. They were graphic designers. Everyone was gone. And workers told me that that meant that the rest of the people at the CDC were locked out of the main social media accounts because all of the passwords were on a Google document.

And suddenly all of the people who had access to that document were no longer working for the CDC. Another thing to point out there is the fact that these employees were placed on administrative leave. They received an email on April 4th. first telling them that their jobs were, quote, duplicative, that their positions were no longer needed because there was another group at the CDC that was doing something similar. And it was theoretically to reduce waste. It's important to note that because they're on administrative leave, what that means is they are no longer working for the CDC, but they are receiving the exact same salary that they were receiving before. They are still getting paid to do their jobs. The only

difference is they're not doing any work. What would be the benefit of doing that? Is it just to kind of keep them silent and not able to communicate to the public? So they've effectively lost their jobs, but they're being paid because of an HR situation that I can't comment on why it's set up like that. Yeah, it's basically like the government is structured this way and they sort of have to be paid out, I guess, like under the type of leave that they're under. It's certainly not like saving the American taxpayers any money to have them on administrative leave. But you're saying like under administrative leave, they can't post, they can't do anything, they can't communicate. And there's no newsletters being sent out either, right?

Almost all of the newsletters that the CDC used to send out and they had hundreds have stopped completely. That includes the newsletter that was sent to clinicians, nurses, emergency personnel, whenever there was an outbreak. That one hasn't been sent out since March, even though there have been new outbreaks of salmonella, Listeria, hepatitis A, hepatitis C, and that newsletter did not go out when those outbreaks first happened. It seems so incredibly dangerous, like the downstream effects of this, as you mentioned. I mean, these are people's little lives at stake. What does the CDC say about all of this stuff when you ask them for comment? That's a great question. When you reach out to the CDC as a reporter now, that experience is very different than what it used to be.

When I reach out for comment, they have been directing me to the HHS team for comment. I receive comment not from the CDC, but from HHS. Another thing to mention there is the FOIA office. So sometimes when I'm doing reporting, I like to have government documents to back up what my sources are saying or to learn about how the government is tracking a certain disease, how they're doing their job. Public records are essential for reporters, and they're also essential for the public. Anyone can request public records. It doesn't have to be just a reporter. And that's part of the deal. We pay the government to do work on our behalf. And the idea of a public records law

is that we, the citizens, have a right to understand how they're working on our behalf. And it's the law that they provide the citizens, they provide the press with documents to show what they're doing. The last time I asked the CDC for documents, I received an email saying that, quote, the FOIA office has been placed on admin leave and is unable to respond to any emails. Wow. So you can't FOIA anything. Like there's no one to even respond to the FOIA request. So when I reached out to the CDC for comment on this reporting on the communications situation at the CDC, like I said, they directed me to HHS. HHS got back to me and they first of all seemed to cast doubt on what the employees were saying. And they also said that the CDC did have access to its X account, to its Twitter account, when I asked them to comment on the fact that the CDC has been locked out of its main social media accounts.

And that's partially true because, as you can see on X, they have been reposting Kennedy. Then I replied and said, well, can you comment on why it seems the CDC has been locked out of every other of its main social media account? and I received no response to that. It doesn't make any sense because even if they were locked out, they could just simply, I mean, this is the government, they could contact Instagram or meta or whatever and get right back in or Google. It just seems so implausible. What about like vendors?

I mean, were they working with any sort of third party comms, vendors or tools? And what are their relationships like with those? Yes, they did have contracts with outside vendors. One of the vendors they used is called Sprout. And that's a basic tool that most people who work in communications use. or at least know about. And the employees told me that that contract is no longer active and that they're currently working on shutting down other contracts. Products like Adobe that help communications professionals create basic information. Adobe, everyone uses to create products that look good

in design, Illustrator, those are basic tools for someone that works in communications and social media and the employees told me that they're scared they're going to lose access to those tools as well soon. For the posts that they are posting, are they getting more engagement? Like, how are people reacting to the new posting strategy? Yeah. So the workers told me that that is a big difference from what engagement was like before. One of them looked up engagement for me on a recent post. And engagement is down 99.9%. Engagement used to be. over 100,000 impressions per post, and now it is in the less than tens of thousands. I want to talk a little bit more about just how important this communication is,

because I feel like the way that we get information has changed so much, even in the past five years since COVID started. Like, we're all just much more online than ever. And it seems like there are just fewer and fewer ways to get the message out to the public when something is happening. Like you said, a Listeria outbreak or something else. Like, If you put it on the nightly news, people won't even see it, right? Social media seems to be the primary way that people get public health information these days just on a broad level. Is that correct? It's certainly one of the main ways that a lot of people get information about what's going on.

Yeah, I would agree with that. Have they been able to leverage any, like, non-social media channels? Like, have they been able to do anything to kind of work around? So it's important to remember that their main team that engaged in this kind of digital. communications is still on administrative leave. They're still not actively working for the CDC. And then there are also communications people who are placed in different divisions at the CDC. So you had one central team that did comms for all of the CDC. And then in different divisions, different departments, they might have one or two comms people that helped with communication of

just that team's work. So some of those people are still around, but less than before as well. Back around two weeks ago, the CDC did bring back from administrative leave a couple hundred employees. Almost none of those were communications officials. There were a couple I've been told, but most of them were not people who worked in communications. It really seems like there is an intentional thinning of the communications force at the CDC. So, first of all, they're working with way less people than they usually had. They're working with fewer tools. From the people who I speak with who are at the CDC, they're absolutely doing everything

they can and they're working as hard as they can to make up for some of those gaps. But I think everyone that I've been speaking with is really set back and delayed in their typical jobs because they are trying to get a sense of the new environment and get a sense of what it's like to work without these colleagues that they used to collaborate with. So I haven't been told about any innovative push on traditional forms of getting information out, like putting a poster out. I'm sure that's something that the teams would be excited to try, but it really seems like from what I've heard from them, they're not in a position to be communicating at all. And then just as a reminder, their HHS is still bottlenecking and controlling all of the CDC communications. So even that sort of communication, if they wanted to.

to get that out to the public, that would be something that they would need to first have approved by HHS. We've talked so much about the comm side of things, which as you mentioned is so crucial to public health. It's how we reach the public through public health is by messaging. But you've reported also on other layoffs at the CDC. Can you tell me what else is going on outside the comms realm? I know you did one story a couple months ago about this hepatitis outbreak and how they laid off a lab. So can you kind of talk about just the broader shifts within the organization and what's happening? Yes. So April 1st, First, there were entire divisions that were placed on administrative leave, hundreds, thousands of people, and entire laps, like you said. So there was the viral hepatitis lab at the CDC.

Every single one of those scientists was placed on administrative leave, told to go home, not allowed to enter the lab. That caused a lot of issues right off the bat. These are scientists who work on sophisticated computers to do genetic analysis to trace. to trace outbreaks of hepatitis, which is a very complicated thing to do. And these people do science that not only no one in the CDC does, but no one in the world does. They have around 70 freezers full of samples.

Some of these samples are decades old. They can't shut down all of that in one day, which is what they were given at first. They were told they had one day to pack up and leave as if they were doing the same job as somebody who only works in paper and pencil. But this is a lab that has been functioning at the CDC for decades. They've been storing all those materials.

It's impossible to shut it down in one day. And then you have these expensive machines that are used for this genetic tracing. And not just at the CDC, but it's something that different states across the country work with this lab, send them samples, have them process it. Those machines need to be maintained in person for them. to function correctly. And I was told that in the time that all of these scientists were placed on administrative leave, some of those machines had already started to malfunction. And that is an expensive fix. Those scientists have since been brought back. So they were part of the more than

400 employees that were taken back from administrative leave around two weeks ago. But there are questions about what people who have been brought back are going to work on now. Some scientists are coming back to find that the budget for the projects they were working on is gone. So maybe they technically have their job back, but they don't have the resources they need to do their job. And that's the situation some people find themselves in. Another division that was eliminated entirely was a division that worked on environmental health. These were people who did lead poisoning prevention, air pollution, that sort of thing.

Every single person was placed on administrative leave. And most of them have been brought back now. But again, those are just the people who haven't taken other jobs or decided they don't want to work with the CDC anymore. They were placed on administrative leave for months. And in that time, things change. You can't just bring back a team and expect it to function the same way. One person who was on that environmental team told me that after she was brought back, she reached out to the partners that she was working with at the state level, this person worked on climate issues, and there were people who at the state level

had already been laid off because they had been placed on administrative leave. So the consequences of that, we're still feeling. And even though they have been technically brought back from administrative leave, it is not a situation that people are comfortable with. Everyone I spoke to was very hesitant to say they were even glad to have their jobs back. Yeah, it seems like we're just throwing a wrench into like decades and decades of scientific research. In the people that you've talked to, I'm wondering if they have any sense of like why this is happening. Because I feel like obviously there's been this aggressive campaign

from RFK Jr. against public health and scientific research and a lot of ways. But a lot of what you're describing reminds me of kind of what Elon Musk did with Doge, where it just seems like this really haphazard kind of cuts without much thought. And, you know, does anyone at the CDC or any of these employees on administrative leave have any sort of sense of if there's a broader plan or what it is? I would say from what I've seen from emails and communicating with some of these employees, the general sentiment is that people are really confused.

In the round of emails that went out on April 1st, when thousands of people at the CDC replaced on administrative leave, they were uniformly told that their jobs were, quote, duplicative, and that they were being done elsewhere and thus their positions were no longer needed. That was the same exercise. explanation that was given to all of the employees who I spoke with, who were placed on administrative leave on April 1st.

So blanket explanation for why they were losing their jobs. And then when some of them were brought back, I saw the email that HHS sent to those people, and there was no explanation of why they were being brought back. Now, I should mention hundreds of people received that email, around 460 people received an email telling them they could come back to the CDC. There are still thousands of people who were placed on administrative leave who did not get that email. And they didn't get an email saying, this is why you have not been brought back. There are a lot of people who are hoping that they will be brought back still.

I've been speaking with employees who believe that they were placed on administrative leave in error, and not this kind of philosophical error that we've been discussing. They really believe and know that this was a clear, clerical error that some of the employees I'm talking to, their code that registered what kind of employee they were that was wrong in the system, in the CDC system. So an entire branch was taken away and those people were mistakenly coded as being part of that branch. So they were also placed on administrative leave, even though they were on a completely different group. And there are more than a dozen of people in that situation who are still in that situation. They were not part of

the more than 100 people who were brought back. And those people really want to come back and do their jobs. That's the general sentiment of everyone that I've been speaking to. These people really care about the public. They could be making a lot more money outside of the government. But they've built their entire careers on informing the public about science, informing the public about outbreaks, figuring out what's going on. They want to come back to a CDC where they're allowed to do those jobs. And many of them feel clueless as to why their jobs were taken away, why their jobs were given back, what's going to happen in the future.

It does not seem like there is a streamlined amount of communication about what's going on that's being shared with employees. Even directors are confused. I've reviewed emails from directors of some of these programs. And they're saying, that they don't know why people were brought back. I'm wondering kind of what the public can do in the meantime, because, you know, I think so many of us are concerned about disease outbreaks or, you know,

I live in L.A. and I saw somebody sent me a report actually from the San Francisco Chronicle today, just about pollutants in the water and the land in light of the L.A. fires. You know, there's constantly food safety issues. COVID is still spreading, and we have absolutely no real, like, national tracking system for that. What should people do that want to stay healthy and safe? You know, are there any other places that they can turn to? Are there regional accounts that they should look at? How can they protect themselves? So there are some of those more minors, CDC accounts that are still publishing about some of these outbreaks that are ongoing. So I would say they could seek out those outlets. They are going to be publishing way less than they used to if the pattern that's been happening for the past couple of months continues. So that's something to pay attention to? I mean, I personally would suggest also turning to more grassroots public health efforts. I think that we've seen, especially since the COVID pandemic started and frankly, the CDC abdicated a lot of their responsibilities, I would argue, when they sort of under Biden

tried to push people to go back to work and sort of stopped, I think, being as overt about airborne disease. I think we've seen a lot more grassroots public health efforts. And same thing in the light of natural disasters, right, with what happened in L.A. I think we have a lot of on the ground groups and things like the People's CDC, which I think works with public health people to put out information in a weekly people's CDC newsletter. I think it's just what's concerning is that that's just a lot of average. I mean, there are public health folks involved, but that's not going to fund a lot of this research, right, that the CDC was doing or opening up these labs or reinstating these jobs. And it seems like just the harm that's happening could really have effect on public health and the health of our society for a long time.

Yeah, I would say journalists are still publishing about this. There are strong health reporters on all of the major outlets that I know of. Really great reporting coming out of stat news, out of the New York Times, out of the Washington Post, out of NPR. We have a great team that covers every aspect of public health and global health. And I would say, just to pop in, make sure if you're reading news articles that you look at who the reporter is from. I mean, I worked at the New York Times. And I remember there was so much difficulty in the early days of COVID because we had econ columnists writing very incorrect information and people getting information from opinion columnists. And so I would say to people like, make sure you're reading actual health and science journalists.

Yes, big difference between opinion pieces that you'll see in a newspaper and reporters who are reporting the facts. Another way that people can get accurate health news is to look on Google Scholar and get the information directly. from the scientists. When I worked as a science reporter for the economist, I would go to Google News and that would be my source for how I figured out what was being published lately. So that's one way. But yeah, if I would make a recommendation, it would be to follow reporters, follow reporters at NPR, follow reporters at the New York Times, follow reporters at Stat News. We are really dedicated to covering what's going on. We stick to the facts and we have fact-checked, edited information. It is screened and it can be trusted. And I should say,

too, on that note, as an investigative reporter, my job is to expose harm that's being done by people in power. That's the government. That's the business. That's anyone that's trying to screw over Americans. And that happens no matter what administration we have in power. I'm an investigative reporter now under this administration, I was an investigative reporter under the previous administration. And I cover corruption, I cover wrongdoing, I cover all of these things, no matter who is in power. There is always harm being done to the American public, unfortunately. And just because I'm covering that now, it doesn't mean I am politically feeling any way about the current administration. I really believe that the effort to expose wrongdoing is something that improves our government.

It improves the quality of life that Americans have. There is real value in bringing information to light. It doesn't mean that you hate America. It actually means that you love America. Yeah. Thank you so much for joining. Where can people continue to follow your work? All of my social media handles are at Kiara Eisner.

My reporting is also on NPR.org. and it's aired on the radio. And yeah. Go tune in. All right, Kara, well, thank you so much again for joining me today. Thank you so much for having me, Taylor. This has been so fun. All right, that's it for the show.

Don't forget to subscribe to my tech and online culture newsletter, Usermag.com. That's Usermag.org, where I write about all of this and more. You can watch full episodes of Power User on my YouTube channel at Taylor Lorenz. If you like the show, give us a rating and review on Apple, Apple, Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. My bestselling book, Streamly Online is also finally out now on paperback. You can get it wherever books are sold.

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