Scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been prohibited from co-authoring publications with World Health Organization staff, dealing a blow to global research efforts and continuing the Trump administration’s aggressive attack on government-funded science.
“CDC staff should not be co-authors on manuscripts/abstracts with WHO staff,” an interim guidance document dated Thursday and obtained by HuffPost says, adding that CDC staff should also not author publications related to work “funded by WHO.”
Depending on whether CDC staff are the lead authors of a given publication affected by the guidance, they are instructed to either pause all action on the publication or recuse themselves as authors if they cannot pause the publication process.
The guidance also says that manuscripts that do not comply with Trump’s executive orders and that were submitted prior to Jan. 20 — the date of Trump’s inauguration, and when he moved to withdraw the United States from the WHO — should be withdrawn, or CDC staff should recuse themselves as authors.
“To not only stop all future work but also make people remove their names from papers already in production is full-on Orwellian,” one person familiar with the document told HuffPost.
“It’s also not even just for work that WHO funds. If anyone in the list of 20 authors on a paper is WHO-affiliated, you have to get out.”
The interim guidance document was shared with staff Thursday in the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, or NCIRD, and specifically its Influenza Division — but it was worded broadly, referring to CDC staff in general in its body text. It’s not clear how many other CDC divisions received the memo.
The influenza division is charged with detecting, preventing and controlling both seasonal and pandemic influenza, both in the United States and around the world. Its scientists study vaccines, detection and pandemic preparedness, and they sequence the genomes of thousands of viruses per year, according to the division’s website.
The memo follows a troubling pattern of attacks on science from the Trump administration.
A meeting on Wednesday of a key independent FDA panel focused on this year’s flu vaccines was recently abruptly canceled without explanation, for example, prompting frustration and panic.
“I am concerned as it will make it much more difficult for manufacturers to produce an updated influenza vaccine for the 2025-2026 flu season,” one member of the panel, Dr. Anna Durbin of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told HuffPost. “It is not clear who made the decision to cancel the meeting or why the meeting was canceled.”
The 2024-2025 flu season has been the worst in 15 years.
The Thursday memo followed an earlier instruction that CDC staff should cut off all communication with the World Health Organization, which was reported by CBS News. The Associated Press similarly reported that CDC staff were to stop all work with WHO staff.
On his first day in office, President Donald Trump ordered the United States to withdraw from the World Health Organization, which is a specialized United Nations agency focused on studying, detecting and responding to infectious disease and other public health concerns. Among other things, Trump’s executive order directed White House budget officials and the State Department to “recall and reassign United States Government personnel or contractors working in any capacity with the WHO.”
But it’s not just the WHO — across the Trump administration, government scientists face mass layoffs, the erasure of years of data, and the cancellation of important publications and scientific meetings.
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Meanwhile, a dangerous bird flu outbreak is spreading among livestock and pets, and a measles outbreak is spreading across Texas.
After a child died of measles in Texas Wednesday — the first U.S. death attributed to the viral infection in a decade — Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. minimized and downplayed the news, telling reporters, “We have measles outbreaks every year.”
The health secretary, who is not a doctor, is “full of shit,” Rep. Kim Schrier (D-Wash.) told HuffPost. Schrier is a pediatrician.