Hey, everybody. It's me, Sam Stein, managing editor at the bulwark. I am doing an emergency

bulwark take here on Saturday. It's about 3.45 p.m. The reason we're doing this is that

overnight there was some remarkable bad news involving the administration.

A slew of firings across the federal government from the administration owed to the government

shutdown, or at least that's what they say.

A number of different agencies have been hit, and I'm going to get to a couple of those. But I really

want to focus on one in particular, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which is the

agency that is frankly in charge of making sure that we are on lookout for diseases, that we

have the proper research to deal with diseases when they come here,

and that we are doing everything we can in terms of prevention.

This administration has been taking an axe to the CDC since the get-go, RFK Jr.,

the Health and Human Services Secretary, has had it in for the CDC owing to

a long-standing gripes anti-vaccine quackery, but also what happened during COVID.

He thinks the agency has lost its mind and lost its direction and lost its purpose.

He also doesn't believe necessarily in combating infectious diseases. He believes in wellness and prevention and things

like that. And so if you remember a couple months ago, there was a fairly dramatic firing of the

CDC director by RFK Jr. because he wanted her to sign off on all of his vaccine recommendations

without looking at the data. She said no. She resigned and then a number of other top

CDC officials resigned. So that's the backdrop already to this. But last night, Friday night,

the administration took a second swing of the acts at the CDC. And they went after some of the

sub-agencies in ways that are kind of confounding to me. The data is

coming in a little bit sporadically because not everyone is sure who actually was fired. They're

...