Lyme Disease Researcher Fired by CDC

Joe Cardiello, PhD, had moved his entire young family to the Fort Collins, Colorado area in September to take a new job in the division of vector-borne diseases at CDC.

Only 5 months later, he now finds himself facing yet another move — because he was caught up in the Trump administration’s first round of mass firings at federal agencies.

“For now, I’m just applying to jobs, getting on daycare lists closer to Boulder and Denver, where there are more biotech jobs, and just getting our family ready for the next potential move,” Cardiello told MedPage Today.

Cardiello was specifically recruited by the CDC to work on tools for earlier detection of tick-borne pathogens. Even though he had the expertise the team was looking for and was a shoe-in for the job, the painstaking federal hiring process still took 6 months. During that time, he also backed out of negotiations for another position that would have had him running his own lab in an academic setting.

None of that seems to have mattered in this round of cuts, which many have described as “indiscriminate.” Cardiello said communications he received from leadership suggested a chaotic process for making decisions about the layoffs. For instance, leadership was given 3 hours in the evening after work one day to rank all probationary employees based on importance, he said.

“They didn’t have time to consult with us or our supervisors,” Cardiello said. “They were very stressed about it and felt horrible.”

“It was, I think, very dehumanizing for everyone,” he added.

A week later, leadership learned that administration officials “had ignored every piece of information they’d given them, and came up with a completely separate list that now had a new way of firing us,” Cardiello said. “I was fired the day after that.”

The firings were not the only chaos caused by recent policy changes at the CDC. Cardiello said while he was still employed, there was a scramble to obtain liquid nitrogen needed to keep their freezers going.

These freezers store specialized cell lines that, in some cases, “have been in there for decades,” he said. The process for getting liquid nitrogen “now involves more red tape than it ever has, which is the opposite of increasing efficiency.”

It also became difficult for CDC researchers to get other basic reagents for a while, he noted.

“People high up in the chain of command [had] to get involved to get something that should be as basic as keeping the lights on,” he said, adding that the team eventually did get emergency permission to obtain the liquid nitrogen and that no freezer “went bad in the end.”

Holiday Goodreau, executive director of the tick-borne disease advocacy organization LivLyme Foundation, said a number of other workers in the vector-borne disease division were also laid off, including biochemists, epidemiologists, public health advisors, and administrative staff. That includes researchers studying Oropouche and dengue viruses, as well as Lyme disease.

The latter is close to Goodreau’s heart because her daughter developed Lyme disease following an unknown tick bite, launching them on an 18-month diagnostic odyssey and ultimately prompting her daughter to start the foundation.

It has been difficult enough to secure funding and resources for tick-borne disease, and now years of recent progress have been destroyed in mere days, Goodreau told MedPage Today.

“It could be decades before we get this research back up and running,” she said. “It’s just devastating.”

Goodreau said CDC scientists also have been impacted by pauses on spending, travel, and external communications. In fact, the ban had a direct impact on her organization’s annual conference. For each of the past 6 years, a representative from HHS and CDC have spoken at the event, providing updates on the state of their work in tick-borne diseases.

“They’re not allowed to speak this year at our conference, or at any conference,” she said.

Leveraging years of networking as a tick-borne disease advocate, Goodreau has been on the phone with senators and representatives from Colorado trying to get scientists reinstated — not only because they “love what they’re doing” but also because Congress has specifically directed funding for some of Cardiello’s team’s work on the early diagnosis of Lyme disease, she said.

“We’re hoping that maybe Bennet [Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.)] can write a letter on the scientists’ behalf to get them reinstated,” Goodreau said. “Their world has been turned upside down. It’s just awful.”

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