{"id":26000,"date":"2026-06-23T12:46:24","date_gmt":"2026-06-23T12:46:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/2026\/06\/23\/bio-2026-us-public-health-as-we-know-it-is-gone-can-we-rebuild-a-better-system-biospace\/"},"modified":"2026-06-23T12:46:24","modified_gmt":"2026-06-23T12:46:24","slug":"bio-2026-us-public-health-as-we-know-it-is-gone-can-we-rebuild-a-better-system-biospace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/2026\/06\/23\/bio-2026-us-public-health-as-we-know-it-is-gone-can-we-rebuild-a-better-system-biospace\/","title":{"rendered":"BIO 2026: US public health as we know it is gone. Can we rebuild a better system? – BioSpace"},"content":{"rendered":"

From left to right: Julie Tierney, former deputy director of the FDA\u2019s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER); Ian Simon, former lead of HHS\u2019 Office of Long Covid; Demetre Daskalakis, former director of the CDC\u2019s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases; Jennifer Eileen Towne, chief scientific officer at Vir Biotechnology; Jared Bauer, CEO and cofounder of Seek Labs.
Jef Akst
When the Department of Government Efficiency\u2014nicknamed DOGE\u2014started slashing jobs at the U.S. health department early last year, it was under the guise of a massive restructuring project. But Demetre Daskalakis, director of the CDC\u2019s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases until October 2025, has a different view.
\u201cWhen you think about a reorganization, you think about re-imagining a structure so it\u2019s better fit to function,\u201d Daskalakis, now chief medical officer at Callen-Lorde, said at a Monday panel during the BIO International Convention in San Diego. \u201cThis feels more like someone is deleting parts of an organization without thought. It\u2019s moth-eaten, for lack of a better term.\u201d
He gave the specific example of a branch within his CDC center that had the word equity in its name. \u201cThey actually had almost nothing to do with health equity,\u201d he explained, but the division was wiped out nonetheless. \u201cCertain things were deleted based on a search or certain terms, and then they just went away.\u201d
In total, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) cut about 10,000 employees<\/a><\/span> in the first half of 2025. Another 10,000 or so left as part of a program to incentivize voluntary departures such as early retirement.
Layer on the continued lack of steady leadership, with a majority of senior roles across the FDA, CDC and NIH being filled only in an acting capacity, and the department continues to survive in a state of flux.
\u201cFrom the perspective of what the staff feels, they feel like the administration doesn\u2019t actually value their work because they\u2019re not giving them a permanent leader,\u201d Daskalakis said specifically of the CDC.
When panel moderator Julie Tierney, former deputy director of the FDA\u2019s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) under well-respected regulator Peter Marks, asked if the situation is recoverable, Daskalakis answered flatly: \u201cNo.\u201d
But he and his fellow panelists maintained an optimistic tone. The U.S. may have transitioned from a golden age to a dark age in public health, but \u201cthe end of a dark age is always a renaissance,\u201d Daskalakis remarked. \u201cNo one ever tries to go fix the Acropolis. . . . They try to build the Sistine Chapel.\u201d
Jared Bauer, CEO and cofounder of Seek Labs, lauded the analogy, agreeing that \u201cone of the things that happens when you tear down everything is you do have an opportunity to build something different.\u201d
The panelists discussed the history of the public health system as it stood before the current turmoil, describing it as a patchwork of centers built in times of necessity. This time around, the country could theoretically build something better.
\u201cThe nice part of disruption is that there\u2019s an opportunity to actually create something with intention,\u201d Daskalakis said.
Stakeholders will have to act quickly to make that happen because infectious disease outbreaks like Ebola and hantavirus continue to become more common. And for now, the panelists agreed\u2014the country is at risk.
\u201cThis sort of moth-eaten approach to dismantling government means that there is not a threshold of staff there that is adequate to make me feel confident to say that we are prepared to respond to a big event,\u201d Daskalakis said.
The staff cuts and leadership turnover at HHS are problematic in obvious ways\u2014such as a lack of experience with outbreak responses\u2014and more subtle ways, said panelist Ian Simon, former lead of HHS\u2019 Office of Long Covid, which was shut down last year.
\u201cI saw firsthand during the COVID response when omicron first emerged in South Africa, the scientists in South Africa contacted NIH leadership almost immediately, days before they contacted their own ministry, because they had a decades-long trusted relationship with NIH leadership,\u201d said Simon, now director of Biosecurity Policy and Partnerships at Flyttr. \u201cIt saved us days to a week . . . and it was built on this informal layer of information sharing that you lose when you ask senior leaders to go find a different line of work.\u201d
Jennifer Eileen Towne, chief scientific officer at Vir Biotechnology, added that such government collaboration is important in industry as well, referring specifically to her company\u2019s work with the NIH on Ebola. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t just funding or speed; it was actually that we really partnered with them on it,\u201d she explained. \u201cSo we actually got the patient samples from the NIH, from patients that had, or people that had survived Ebola.\u201d
Banking on his eternal optimism, which he says is part and parcel of startup life, Bauer described a best-case scenario for moving forward. \u201cI would love to see, over the course of the next five to ten years, more of a strategy that is going to protect us long term, built from the bottom up to protect us globally.\u201d
His realism shone through, however, as he clarified that \u201cthere\u2019s a difference between what I think and what I hope. What I think is that likely we\u2019re going to create a similar mess to what we would do in the past. What I hope is we build the Sistine Chapel.\u201d
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From left to right: Julie Tierney, former deputy director of the FDA\u2019s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER); Ian Simon, former lead of HHS\u2019 Office of Long Covid; Demetre Daskalakis, former director of the CDC\u2019s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases; Jennifer Eileen Towne, chief scientific officer at Vir Biotechnology; Jared Bauer, CEO […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":26001,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26000","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26000","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26000"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26000\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26001"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26000"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26000"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}