As outbreaks get worse, important CDC statistics and analyses on flu and bird flu go missing.
Sonya Stokes, a doctor in the San Francisco Bay Area who works in an emergency room, gets ready for a huge influx of sick patients every day who have headaches, pain, fevers, vomiting, and other flu-like symptoms.
She needs to know something right away, but the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) hasn’t said anything since President Trump took office. CDC is usually a great place to get quick information about the flu and other health threats.
She said, “Without more information, we are blind.”
This flu season has been terrible. Since the beginning of October, the flu has caused at least 24 million illnesses, 310,000 hospitalisations, and 13,000. There have also been at least 24 million deaths. At the same time, cattle and farmworkers are still getting sick from the bird flu spread. Doctors and public health experts say that the CDC has stopped talking to doctors, researchers, and the World Health Organisation and is taking too long to do studies that would tell people about these situations.
According to Maria Van Kerkhove, interim director of epidemic and pandemic preparedness at the WHO, the CDC is not reporting influenza statistics through the WHO global platforms, FluNet and FluID. For many, many years, they have been doing so. She said this at a press briefing on February 12.
“We’re talking to them,” she said, “but we haven’t heard back yet.”
President Donald Trump said the U.S. would leave the WHO on his first day in office.
People close to the CDC say that work on a critical study of the seasonal flu that was supposed to be sent out through the CDC’s Health Alert Network has stopped. They asked not to be named because they were afraid of being hurt. The HAN network is the main way that the CDC shares important public health information with doctors, health officials, and sometimes the public.
KFF Health News looked at a picture from that study that makes it look like the flu may be at an all-time high. In early February, about 7.7% of people who went to clinics and hospitals but were not treated had flu-like symptoms. This was a higher percentage than in four other flu seasons shown in the graph. That includes the winter of 2003–2004, when an unusual type of flu made things especially dangerous and killed at least 153 children.
But without a full investigation, it’s not clear if this huge number of sick people is a sign of a rise in hospitalisations and deaths that schools, shops, and hospitals need to get ready for. Other information could tell us how many of the flu-like illnesses are caused by flu viruses or what kind of flu is spreading. A more in-depth report could also show if the flu is worse or more contagious than normal.
“What to look for so I know if my patients are in danger,” Stokes said. “I need to know if we are dealing with a more virulent strain or a coinfection with another virus that is making my patients sicker.” “Delays in data make things dangerous on the front lines.”
The CDC’s flu dashboard shows that there is a lot of flu, but it doesn’t have all the information that is needed to understand what is going on. HAN alerts tell health care workers how to protect patients and the public, but this one doesn’t match those needs. In 2023, for example, a study told clinics that people with respiratory symptoms should be tested for other viruses instead of assuming they had the flu. That year, other viruses were causing similar problems.
Rachel Hardeman, who is on the Advisory Committee to the Director of the CDC, said, “This is very upsetting.” On February 10, Hardeman and other committee members wrote to Susan Monarez, who is working as director of the CDC, asking the agency to explain why data is missing, studies are being held up, and staff cuts could be very bad. The letter said, “The CDC is essential to the safety of our country.”
The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, which is the CDC’s most important scientific release, has also been late or missing a number of studies. An ex-chief deputy director at the CDC named Anne Schuchat said she would be worried if political pressure was put on science information: “Suppressing information is potentially confusing, potentially dangerous, and it can backfire.”
The CDC’s spokeswoman, Melissa Dibble, wouldn’t say anything about analyses that were late or not done at all. She said, “It’s not surprising to see flu activity high and rising at this time of the year.”
KFF Health News looked at a draft of an unpublished report that has been kept from the MMWR for three weeks. It talks about how a milk hauler and a dairy worker in Michigan may have given bird flu to their cats. The cats that lived inside got very sick and died. The workers weren’t tested, but the study says that one of them had itchy eyes before the cat got sick, which is a familiar sign of bird flu. People who knew that person said the pet “would roll in their work clothes.”
According to the probe, a teenager in the house got a cough after one of the cats got sick. But the study says this young person did not have the flu but did have a virus that causes colds.
The CDC papers that went with them summarised the cat study and another bird flu study that hasn’t been released yet. They said the reports would be out on January 23. KFF Health News looked over these. In the cat briefing, dairy farmworkers are told to “remove clothing and footwear and rinse off any animal biproduct residue before entering the household to protect others in the household, including cats that may only be inside.”
In the second summary, “the most comprehensive” study of the bird flu virus found in US wastewater is talked about.
Jennifer Nuzzo, who runs the Pandemic Centre at Brown University, said that the delays in bird flu reports are frustrating because they’re needed to let people know that things are getting worse and there are a lot of unknowns. Because there was “insufficient data” and “high uncertainty,” the UK raised its assessment of the risk that the U.S. outbreak would pose to dairies.
“Uncertainty is caused by missing and late data,” Nuzzo said. “It might also motivate us to act in ways that aren’t helpful.”
In February 2013, three weeks after it was supposed to come out, another bird flu study that was supposed to come out in January did happen. Antibodies against the bird flu virus were found in the blood of three cattle vets, which showed that they had been infected last year without knowing it. One of the vets worked in Georgia and South Carolina, which aren’t places that have said they have had outbreaks on dairy farms.
Another piece of proof that the US is not finding enough cases in people and cows is this study. Nuzzo said that it also shows how data can give us good news. Three out of 150 vets who work with cattle showed signs of having been infected before. This suggests that the virus doesn’t easily move from animals to people. More than 40 dairy workers have been infected, but it’s usually because they’ve been around sick cows and their milk for a longer time than vets have.
Instead, reports that have come out lately have been about fires in Hawaii and California.
“Interesting, but not urgent,” Nuzzo said, since there were no longer any serious fire situations. She said that the bird flu case is still going on and that we need “urgent health threat information to know how to protect people.”
Schuchat said, “The American people are more at risk when we don’t have information at the right time.”
The CDC and other health agencies were told by a federal judge this week to “restore” information and websites that the group Doctors for America had sued and said had been changed. The judge also told the agencies to “identify any other resources that DFA members rely on to provide medical care” and get them back up and running by February 14.
In their letter, members of the CDC advisory committee asked for a probe into reports that were late or missing data. Hardeman, a health policy expert and adviser at the University of Minnesota, said that the group didn’t understand why data and scientific results were being hidden or taken down. “I hold accountable the acting director of the CDC, the head of HHS, and the White House,” she said.
He said that the Trump administration has the power to get rid of the advisory group. She said that the group knows that will happen and went ahead with its claims anyway.
“Because we care so much about public health, we want to protect the strength of the work at the CDC,” she said. “We’re not here to be quiet.”
