The CDC once rescued my faith in science — who will rescue us now?

The ongoing turmoil at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the shocking attack at its Atlanta headquarters in August brought back memories of the first time I saw the CDC in action. It was the first time I understood what it means when science stands above politics. That moment was in Cuba, during the neuropathy epidemic in the early 1990s.

At the time, I was a young scientist working at a virology lab at the Center for Genetic Engineering in Havana, studying the hepatitis C virus. Seemingly out of nowhere, tens of thousands of Cubans began to lose their vision and suffer acute nerve pain. In some severe cases, people lost their ability to walk. 

The country was in economic freefall after the collapse of the Soviet Union and an ongoing and recently tightened economic embargo by the United States. The Cuban government was desperate for someone or something to blame for the outbreak. Food shortages and imbalanced nutrition were obvious culprits, but suggesting that was politically dangerous, as a health minister discovered when made this point and was promptly removed.

Instead, the Cuban government pushed the idea that some virus was causing these symptoms. My laboratory and others were suddenly pressed into finding this virus. We were given samples from affected patients but no control samples, making any real scientific study impossible. We were under enormous pressure. We worked day and night, reporting our results to Cuba’s political leaders – even to Fidel Castro himself. 

Sure, we found fragments of viral-like sequences in the spinal fluid of people suffering from neuropathy. But others had reported similar sequences in fluid before us, in many cases associated with aseptic meningitis or in connection with an immunocompromised situation. So finding those fragments wasn’t new or unexpected. The Cuban neuropathy epidemic was different. The data didn’t add up. There was no clear transmission, no consistency across the samples, and no viral association to the ongoing outbreak that would ultimately affect more than fifty thousand people. 

And then the CDC arrived. A team led by CDC scientist David Freedman and joined by colleagues from Emory and UCSF broke through the political wall. Their reputation was too great for the Cuban government to ignore. 

They quickly carried out a rigorous epidemiological study and proved what we could not say ourselves: this was not a virus. The cause was vitamin deficiency, particularly a lack of B vitamins. Within weeks, the government began distributing supplements. The epidemic ended without fatalities. My team and I were allowed to come home after three weeks of non-stop, nonsense work.

Seeing the CDC in action changed me. I saw how science, when practiced with integrity, could stand up to ideology and save lives. The CDC wasn’t just another institution; it was a lifeline. It rescued Cuba from a health disaster, and it rescued me from the suffocating feeling that science could only serve politics – which isn’t even science.

Fast forward thirty years, and I wonder who will rescue us now. The CDC, instead of being allowed to defend public health, is being hollowed out. We’re seeing the loss of extraordinary people – the same kind of people who once flew into Havana and turned the tide against an epidemic. The consequences aren’t just political.

We are heading into the flu season in 2025. Bird flu is not a myth; it’s here. We cannot make it disappear by looking the other way or underreporting cases. Pathogens don’t care what we believe or about our politics. Pathogens are real and require that we call them as we see them. If the CDC loses more of its talent – if its authority is further eroded – then when the next crisis comes, who will stand up for us?

I learned in Cuba that the CDC’s strength is not in politics but in its people and their integrity. That lesson is as urgent today as it was in 1993. The scientists who work at the CDC today were almost certainly not there in the ​‘90s, but they’re of the same ilk. They are dedicated public servants, mentored and trained by the CDC’s prior generations. They have the same integrity that is part of the CDC’s institutional DNA; it is a constant. If we drain that strength, the price will be paid not in headlines, but in actual lives.