CDC Health Agency Head Gerberding Drives Away Top Talent, Embitters Employees

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Independence of CDC Scientists in Question
Insiders Say Health Agency Head Gerberding Drives Away Top Talent, Embitters Employees

By Arthur Allen 03/03/2008


Over the past four years, the office at the Centers for Disease Control that is responsible for vaccine safety has undergone numerous leadership changes, internal conflicts and a flight of senior scientists.

Some departing scientists and outside experts have charged that senior CDC officials are failing to give the office the independence it requires to investigate possible harm from vaccines. The accusations have come at a time when the number of routine childhood shots is swelling—preschoolers now get 10 separate types of shots in most states, double the number in 2000. New vaccines are being administered to teenagers as well. In the latest addition to the vaccine schedule, a CDC panel on Wednesday recommended that all children up to 18 years of age receive yearly flu vaccination.

The bitterness and disputes at the Immunization Safety Office, moreover, are par for the course at the CDC under the leadership of Dr. Julie Gerberding, who took over in 2002 after handling the agency’s response to the anthrax mailings.

In more than a dozen interviews, senior CDC scientists complained that Gerberding has driven away the agency’s best scientists while embittering many of its 7,000 employees. She implemented a sweeping reorganization that centralized control and boosted public relations efforts while introducing expensive, often unworkable new management techniques. The officials charge that the once-independent CDC has been brought under tighter political control from the White House.

In 2005, five of the agency’s last six directors charged in an unprecedented letter that Gerberding’s management and politicization of the agency were harming CDC’s unparalleled international reputation in the field of public health. Daily complaints on a venting website provide a window into a dispirited, demoralized workforce.

A half-dozen senior scientists told The Washington Independent that they now spend roughly a third of their time on administrative tasks that previously took up no more than 10 percent. In the view of many, Gerberding took a functioning, vibrant agency and subjected it to a needless purges and restructuring. In some cases, scientists who champion unpopular positions, like non-abstinence forms of birth control, have been muzzled. For the most part, however, the main complaint is that the administration is burying them in red tape.

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http://www.washingtonindependent.com/view/independence-of-cdc