Just A Bunch Of Nerds Who Want To Help

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I'm Jane Marie, and this is the dream. Hi, I was listening to one of your latest episodes, and I was thinking about my dream, dream which

from a pretty young age was to be in science and then became that I wanted to work for the CDC

and I did that and I have been doing that for a while now

I

feel like voices like mine should probably be heard

we got this voicemail on our tip line 323-248-1488 and the caller bravely agreed to sit down for an interview on one condition.

I don't feel comfortable

doing this on your mini name or anything. Like, I feel like it has to be anonymous, which is wild because

I'm just a scientist, but now somehow my job is dangerous, which is a crazy thing to say.

Tell me your fake name and a little bit about who you are.

My fake name is Rachel,

and I am a microbiologist. I have a master's in microbiology, specializing in infectious disease bacteriology.

And I mostly work on diagnostic-based research and surveillance. Who and the what? Now, what's what is diagnostic?

So when your doctor submits a sample, like a blood sample for a a test to find out if you have something that's a diagnostic, so a type of test, a way that we can figure out what people have, essentially.

Question. Yeah.
When I go to the doctor and I pee in a cup, is that what you're talking about like? Yeah. Yeah.
That's one of a, that's a type of diagnostic.

So anytime they take your blood and submit it for any number of things, anytime you pee in a cup, anytime

like a COVID test is a diagnostic.

So yeah, even like a pregnancy test can be considered a diagnostic. That's a type.

Right. And it's looking, all of them have different things they're looking for, obviously.
Yeah, it's a super, super broad term.

Like it could be for any number of things and they test for different types and they use different modes of testing. So it's a super broad term.

Tell me how you got into this work.

I've always been a big nerd. My teacher in high school did a microbiology unit, which I don't think is super common.
And I just fell in love with it. I

did a report on tuberculosis and was completely enamored.

Oh my God, I want to be your best friend in high school. I want to be your best friend in high school.

I think we would have gotten along. Yeah.

You too.

Do you have glasses? Do you do do the

waiven? You know, the scientist from The Simpsons is always like,

I mean, I wore a lab coat to cut the cake at my wedding. So that's a level.

That's so adorable.

In college, we had to do a speech class, and I wrote one of my speeches on the opening line was something along the lines of when people see Boulon Rouge, they think about like romance or whatever.

And I think about tuberculosis because that's what she died from in the movie

but I thought I wanted to be a veterinarian and realized pretty quickly that

I was more interested in the diseases than like treating a whole animal and anatomy and interacting with people all the time like pet owners that's very difficult I think that paper and also we did something where we got to grow bacteria on plates and see it and i love a pet tree dish they're so great for listeners that don't know what a pea tree dish is, what is it?

It is a plate. So a round plate with sides that you put a growth media in.
So it's kind of like a jello consistency that has nutrients in it that allow a bacteria to grow.

So it's usually like sugars, amino acids,

depending on what bacteria you're trying to grow. Sometimes it'll have antibiotics in it.
They put it in an incubator and each bacteria has a different temperature that they like to grow at.

Some of them like more oxygen. Some of them like no oxygen.
Some of them are beautifully colored. Yeah.

Why are they different colors?

There's a lot of reasons for different colors. So what the bacteria is growing on can be made of a lot of different things.
So some of it has blood cells in it. There's some dyes.

It all depends on the questions you want to answer. And then the way that the bacteria interact with what's present there can cause color changes.

But with some of these tests, if you have a plate, your bacteria on it may have a chemical reaction with whatever's in there and cause a color change.

Why does it look like snowflakes sometimes? That's called morphology. So every bacteria grows differently.

And that's one way that... especially early microbiology, you could kind of tell what you had based on what that morphology or the shape on the plate looked like.

They put it in an incubator and each bacteria has a a different temperature that they like to grow at. Some of them like more oxygen.
Some are stickier than others.

Some have that kind of snowflake spread out. Some of them like no oxygen.
Yeah.

So part of your research, I know, has to do with

bugs. Vector-borne diseases.
Yeah.

So mosquitoes, ticks, fleas, mites, some biting flies, they're all vectors. It's like the thing that gets you sick.
They are the worst.

Yeah, truly. Super gross.
And they'll eat anything and then they'll go eat another thing and give that thing the thing that they got from the last thing. Exactly.
Yes. And we all die.
Yeah.

Hopefully not. That's what we're working on.
Isn't malaria one of the biggest killers on earth? Yeah.

And they cut and how are cutting like all the funding for malaria research and prevention and stuff. There is still a small group, but they cut a lot of it.

They mean they, like meaning the administration? Yeah. At the end of January, they had a funding freeze.

And although those freezes have technically been lifted, they have made it very, very difficult for us to spend any money. So

in order to just put in a credit card request to do the research I need to do, you jump through hoops that change.

It used to be weekly, now it's maybe monthly, but still you may never know what they need to do to put in a credit card order, just to order something simple.

Are you talking about like a Petri dish?

Yeah.

It's become very, very difficult. And especially in the beginning, it was like we had a diagnostic that we had to put on hold because we couldn't get what we needed.
What?

So like we had a patient sample and we could not test it because we couldn't get this reagent in time. It's been incredibly frustrating, to say the least.

So are you doing what teachers do, which is like go out of pocket, go to Joann's and get your own crayons or whatever? We can't. Why? What? Some of this stuff is expensive.

I mean, if I want to do a sequencing run, that's $2,000. I'm not going to pay for that out of pocket.
Sure. Like, I just can't.
Right.

Because contrary to what they think, we don't get paid buckets of money. If I was in pharmaceuticals, I could make more.

It's, you know, I'm not complaining, but I just think they think we make just a shit ton of money.

Rachel, I hear a quiver in your voice. Yeah.
I'm a little nervous. Why?

Um,

I don't know. It's weird to think about people hearing hearing about it.
And also, I just have a lot of feelings about everything that's happening. It's upsetting.
I'm sorry.

You're out of a job today, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. And supposedly we'll be paid back at the end of this, but now they're saying maybe not.
So who knows? Who's they?

Well, I think right now it's mostly Russell Vogt who's saying. Maybe we don't pay federal employees back after Harlow.

Who is this? He's the person who wrote the project 2025. It's a law that the first Trump administration put in that if there was a furlough, we would get paid back.
It didn't used to be automatic.

And then now Russell Boat, who is a nightmare creature, is saying maybe that's not true. Maybe we don't get paid back.

So he's also the person who said he wanted federal employees to feel trauma every day. We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected.

We want when they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work

because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that they have no bandwidth financially to do so.
We want to put them in trauma.

Wishing trauma upon anyone is evil. Yeah.
Well, they see us as evil. They see federal employees as evil and RFK Jr.
is painting CDC employees as evil. So.

Is it just to kill everybody? Because I kind of suspect that is what it is. That's how it feels.

Hmm. Either it's complete ignorance, which I think there is some of that, but I do think there are some of these people that are very diabolical.

That thought first occurred to me during COVID with the anti-masker people and the anti-vaxxer people, where they were thrilled about thinning the herd.

Yeah.

Like, well, they're fat and old, so bye.

Yeah.

I think there's a lot of that.

I think a lot of these people, you know, I think Musk's thing is privatizing everything, that the government doesn't pay for things. You have private companies pay for things.

The problem with that in our situation, at least, like public health can't be privatized. You just can't.

Say more about that. What do you mean?

Public health is expensive and it doesn't. give companies money generally.

I think that's the other thing is like we don't have our terms

Yeah.

So, the crux is to improve the health of communities.

I mean, that's that's the baseline, and that encompasses a lot of different things.

That can be chronic health, that can be gun violence, that can be infectious disease, it can be environmental situations. I mean, all that stuff can be covered under public health.

The whole crux is to make communities healthier and safer in any kind of meaningful way.

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So public health encompasses all of these sorts of things and it's being deprioritized. Yeah.

When was it prioritized? That's a good question. I think there's been stages of it and some people focus on different aspects.

I mean, it wasn't until I think the Biden administration let the CDC start collecting gun violence data again. That was recent and then they took that away again.

There's usually some event that causes an area of public health to get money, right? So, you know, we had a bump in pandemic preparedness after kind of the bulk of lockdown and stuff.

So they'll see some kind of emergency and put money into that. So I think it ebbs and flows, but it's political at the end of the day.
Kind of depends on who cares about what.

Have you listened to the show? Yeah.

So you've met my aunt and my grandma. Yeah.

They have this contempt for people that like spent many, many years studying. Does that feel new?

It feels new to me. And I'm sure it's not new in all.
places, but my little bubble, a lot of this feels very new of like

a resentment of experts. And I think about it a lot.
I think some of it is that we can't explain things in a way that makes sense. I mean, our healthcare system is not great, obviously.

And so people get frustrated and people are sick and don't get answers. And what do you think about the idea that healthcare is separate from science?

Because I keep thinking about this, like the way we manage health care, like the way we manage office visits and like treatments is one thing, right?

But the science that we base those ideas on is another thing.

I haven't thought about it in those terms specifically, but it's, it feels impossible to divorce them to me, because even if you're talking about,

you know, some psychology or social sciences about how people react to how care is presented or how options are presented or how things are communicated, you know, science communication is a big field that I think we need more emphasis in.

And I think all that's part of the healthcare process, right? You have to get your patients to understand what's happening in a way that feels digestible and not overwhelming.

You have to be able to communicate what's going to happen to them or what they need to do at home.

So I think for me, and this probably just where my brain is all the time, that I don't think they should be separate, but it's just different levels of science or different types.

What do you mean it shouldn't be separate? Like the Petri dish thing we were just talking about.

When I'm in my doctor's office, a peanut cup, I think I have a UTI, or my throat hurts, they swab the back of my throat. They go in the other room.

My thinking is whatever happens in the other room is their business.

Sure. Like, I don't want to follow the lab tech back in the office and watch them do the Petri dish thing.
Sure. I have a life.
There are like experts for things and we don't care about that anymore.

And I don't know why it's happening, but I feel like there's some hubris, some mania happening where everything has to be like self-centered or something.

It's so hard. And I think we have a big science communication issue, I think, in our country, because right now people are debating things that have big complicated answers.

And kind of the way that I'm talking, you know, it's hard for scientists to give straight, clear. easy to understand binary answers to things because everything's so complicated.

And so people get frustrated with us. And I think sometimes it can sound like we're obfuscating or lying or whatever they say.

And then there are people who are willing to give them basic black and white answers. And that sounds more trustworthy.
So it's, it's hard. That is so interesting.
Go on.

Yeah. I mean, I've been thinking about this a lot because

There's a lot of health stuff that's very scary and there's a lot of stuff we don't understand. And I can understand where people get desperate desperate for answers and want solutions to things.

And it's very hard to provide those a lot of the time.

And so if you get a community of people who are willing to make shit up, you know, the Maha movement, I think, give you specific answers that sound reasonable. That's comforting.

I think people think that they should be able to understand everything that's happening. And people could look up scientific publications.
That's great.

Without knowing context, you could could pull something out of that that is completely not true.

This paper shows that measles prevents cancer, and they don't want you to know that.

Well, the paper was that they were using the measles components in the vaccine to try to target specific types of cancer because it was a product we already had that we know was safe and all these things so that we could target a very specific type of cancer.

It is not like if you get measles, that virus is going to prevent cancer. It was an engineered particle situation.
So that's the kind of thing where it gets really dangerous.

I'm like, well, I saw this publication. You tell me to look at publications.
And

there's just so much information available that it's overwhelming and it's impossible to fully understand.

I was a nerd and I liked science and I liked thinking about thinking as a kid. And I respected the fact that there were people who invested decades of their lives into one specific thing.

I think a lot of it is a deep distrust.

They're scared and they don't trust experts. So it's more than not wanting to feel like you don't understand anything.
It's about not trusting the people who say they're experts.

On the morning of August 25th, Secretary Kennedy demanded two things of me that were inconsistent with my oath of office and the ethics required of a public official.

He directed me to commit in advance to approving every ACIP recommendation, regardless of the scientific evidence.

He also directed me to dismiss career officials responsible for vaccine policy without cause.

He said if I was unwilling to do both, I should resign. I responded that I could not pre-approve recommendations without reviewing the evidence, and I had no basis to fire scientific experts.

He told me he had already spoken with the White House several times about having me removed.

I listened to the entire three-hour Senate hearing of Dr. Menares, the ousted CDC director.
You know, she said that RFK said to her that CDC kills babies

and they don't care. He said that CDC employees were bought by the pharmaceutical industry.
He said CDC forced people to wear masks and social distance like a dictatorship.

And the one I think that hurt me the most was a particularly vivid phrase. He said during the COVID outbreak.

CDC told hospitals to turn away sick COVID patients until they had blue lips before allowing them to get treatment. And it is fair to say, in your view, that those statements are not true.

Those statements are not true.

They believe that because COVID was scary and confusing for a lot of people. I mean, it was scary and confusing for everybody, right?

And that kind of morphed into this: you can't trust the experts they're out to get you.

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New details about last week's deadly shooting near CDC headquarters in Atlanta. ABC's Aikajachi has more on that.

According to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, they say that White fired over 500 rounds, 200 of which striking over six different cdc buildings over 150 windows across those six buildings have been destroyed bullets even penetrating some blast resistant glass narrowly missing employees who were sheltering in place in their offices

it's gonna take a dark turn are you ready That's my life these days.

Well, I was thinking it must be nice to have these days off during the government shutdown because you're at least not getting shot at. Yeah.
Can you talk about that incident in August? Yeah. Yeah.

So

I was not there. I do know people who were and just the feelings that it brought up were sort of unexpected for me.

Like what?

I was thinking about iterations of the American Dream and I just kept thinking like this was my dream and this is all I wanted to do.

You know, once I figured out what micro was, I wanted to work for the CDC.

And

having this event happen and not seeing it anywhere, you know, or just like a blip and feeling like this was the first attack on a government building since Oklahoma city bombing and nobody's talking about it and nobody cares about us.

And like, there was a, there's a daycare in the front.

Can you just walk me through that day?

So I

came home and I got a text from my friend. It happened at the end of the day on Friday.
And I got a text from my friend that said something

along the lines of like, what a fucking day. And I didn't know what was happening yet.
And she was stuck in her office.

And it took a long time to figure out what was going on because,

you know, there's chaos in those moments. But then even after there just wasn't a lot of reporting.

So we started hearing about it from our leadership. We'd have some meetings.

But we know that 500 rounds were shot at the building and there was

an officer killed. But just the idea that somebody hated scientists that much, like I like to say that we're just a bunch of nerds that want to help people.

And

as Dr. Howry said in that Senate hearing, like, and she was the former chief medical officer, like every one of those bullets was meant for a person.

And the fact that like, I think people like RFK made that person feel like we were evil and we deserved that is

so upsetting, to say the least. And like they made us take our decals off our cars, like our parking decals.
And what do you mean?

Like we used to have little stickers that said HHS so that they could like.

you know know our car belonged in the parking lot and they said you know take those stickers off so you're not a target out and about.

Like, I'm guessing that when you got into this career, you never thought that people would want to murder you. Never,

never.

And I thought that if I was gonna talk to somebody about what I did, I'd get to say everything I did and not worry about somebody figuring out where I work based on or what I do based on what I say,

especially given that the focus of your work is to save lives.

Yeah,

yeah, and I'd love to talk about what I do because I think it has saved lives.

I know it has.

I didn't think I was getting into something dangerous. And I just, I know these people and I know how much

we care about people.

I mean, I wanted to, I

tried to volunteer to help with Ebola. And at the time, I was not.
a full-time employee as a contractor. So like legally they wouldn't let me do it.
But I am fine with that kind of thing.

Like I will put myself in that kind of situation. I want to help with a public health emergency, but that's a risk I understand.

That's not hate-based.

That's something I could do to

help.

What's so confounding about that incident of the CTC getting shot up is like it feels threefold. Number one, gun control, right? Yeah.

Number two,

we don't care about mental health. Yeah.

And then we give people with mental health issues guns yeah and then they try to kill you and your colleagues and then they shoot themselves yeah didn't he kill himself yeah yeah so clearly like having a mental break yeah um

that's not important

then this hatred of science that's going on And the villainization of federal employees in general.

And RFK wouldn't talk about it and the president didn't talk about it, which is not shocking, but it's so weird. It would be shocking any other time.

Someone fired 500 rounds into your office and your boss didn't say a word about it. Yeah.

And I think that's what started the whole thing with the director getting fired because it's really clear that she was very affected by the shooting. And

like, yeah, if you have a conscience, it would upset you. Yeah.
And she started pushing to get things fixed and changed and to get things made safer for people.

And so she was kind of pushing for the first time.

And

everything has to get approved by HHS and they didn't want to do it.

And then this man goes out publicly and says she's just a liar. Yep.
Not trustworthy, I mean. Yep.

I don't know why I was so surprised when that came out that she was making public statements about it, but I was so thrilled.

We were shocked, honestly, because nobody had high hopes, right? Yeah. Because she was chosen.
And then she stood up for science. And that's.

Because he was so brazen with his accusations about her. Yeah.
That she's lying about vaccine safety, right?

The implication being, though, that he had to fire her because she works for an organization that is making up. the idea that vaccinations are important.
Yeah. That's what he wants people to believe.

Yeah. What is the CDC without someone like that, though?

Scary.

You know, after she was fired and then three people resigned, there are no more career people at the office of the director of CDC.

So there are no more scientists or people who have been there for longer than since the end of January in charge. Nobody.

Everyone who works in the administration at the CDC is new.

So everyone who works in the office of the director, so like what she was, who's appointed, who's in charge of everything, who stamps off on everything, none of those people were CDC employees or are CDC employees.

They're all, they've all been appointed by the administration.

Deb Howry, for example, was the chief medical officer. She's been at the CDC for

a very long time. I don't remember.
how long, but she was trying to advise people on things and they didn't. I mean, RFK told Menares not to talk to any career people.

So career means like, yeah, you were hired off of merit for the CDC. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Merit-based.
Hey,

imagine that. I was just going to say, isn't that the other side of the coin, right? Is that these people believe we live in a meritocracy or they don't believe it?

They, but that's the story they're usually selling. But how come in this industry, why in this industry is merit not important?

Because they're the merit-based people will not say what they want. And what do they want, want said?

The vaccines, I don't know exactly, but that vaccines are dangerous. They want things changed.
And it's unclear what the depths of that are. You know, it's like, this is just the beginning.

I feel like vaccines were the first target because that's what a lot of people have been the most up in arms about. But I think it's going to spread to other things.

Who knows what that'll result in? But they won't be briefed by any experts from the CDC. Like they will not

take briefings from the directors of different departments or scientists in general. Like they will not even just get a basic briefing.
So at some point it feels like, at what point is my work a joke?

At what point is no one going to listen to anything that comes out that we do, even if what we do is still good because of all of this? Like, at what point is working there

part of the problem? Pointless and part of the problem? Like, am I co-signing something by working there at some point? Like,

do you guys talk about that?

Not in my group. I feel like we don't.

The morale is so bad. We just don't even talk about it much anymore.
Like, it's just. Do you guys hang out after work anymore? No.
Not really. No.
I mean, we did the day that the shutdown happened.

We went to lunch, but we hadn't in a while.

What is the, what's the like mood around the office around all this stuff? Is everybody feeling sad or paranoid or what?

Yeah. I mean, you just look at people's faces, and it's a very different feeling.

There's definitely different degrees of it, but

I think people are kind of always waiting for the next thing to happen, for the next email to come out, for the next shoe to drop.

I

don't tell people what I do most of the time. I used to be so proud.

And most of the time, I don't tell people where I work or what I do.

It feels too hard. Yeah, we're

We're not good.

Oh, I hate hearing you say that. It's scary.
It is.

I'm scared what's going to happen. I mean...

What do you think is going to happen?

I don't know what's going to happen, but I know that if COVID happened today, we would be so much worse off. Just period.
There's no ifs, ands, or buts about it. It'd be way worse.

Yeah, everybody's talking about what they're going to, what they will do if they should try to find another job job or what that would look like or if they go to a different career entirely.

I mean, there's a lot of those kinds of conversations about what do we do? Where do we go? What are you gonna do, Rachel?

I don't know.

I am very lucky to have a partner who I can get on his insurance

if I leave. So, but I don't know what I do next because there's not a lot of options.
I mean, a lot of people are talking about moving to different countries.

You know, it's not even like, well, I could just go to academia, right? Because so many grants are being cut that there's not a lot of jobs there either.

There's not a lot of pharmaceutical options in my area. I'd probably have to move.
I don't really want to do that. I mean, I could,

but I like public health. I'm here for a reason.

I feel like our memory is so short anymore.

And so these huge epidemics that killed and maimed millions of people.

I don't know. We're not going to solve this today, but I want to.
So go, you solve it. Go, Rachel, go.

I wish I could. I wish that people would just let me do my job.
And

I just keep thinking about all the NIH grants that got cut that

means people won't get cancer treatment that they could have saved them. I don't know.
I mean, it's hard.

I don't have answers other than we need the money that we had. And,

you know, things obviously weren't perfect before, but it's a lot worse now.

And it's this thing where I feel like the people in power can't hold two truths. Yes.

Like diseases aren't going anywhere. No, they're not.
And there's so many. I mean, this is the thing.
There are so many that we don't know about.

And so if we don't know everything that's out there, because we're not doing the research, we don't know what to treat people for.

So, you know, it only helps to

keep doing it. I just keep thinking about the brain drain that happened during World War II or that era because

people were pushed out. And so that's what built a lot of America's scientific power was

taking those people. And we built programs that people all over the world benefit from.
I mean, the U.S. does a lot of basic research that isn't done anywhere else that allows

people in other countries and other places to further their research because you can't start a pharmaceutical company without a basic,

you know, something that finds something you didn't expect and then you can take that somewhere else. But the U.S.
does a lot of that basic research work and we're just demolishing that.

And so it's becoming this like reverse brain drain where they're just, we're all going to have to go somewhere else or do something else or. Well, and then compound that with anti-immigration.
Yeah.

I've worked with so many people that got those visas to come in and work and study and

who have been a benefit to science in our country and me as a person. And that's just not going to happen.

What's going to happen to the rest of us as a result

of

these grants going away, of

the CDC being

demoted in terms of how important we believe it is?

What's the nightmare scenario? I mean, it makes me sad because I think there's a lot of, you know, there's been so much advancer in just cancer research alone.

So many clinical trials that have just been canceled. And then, you know, the other thing that I think about is all these

grants in academia that are canceled so that people can't go to grad school, let alone, you know, stay in grad school or be able to do that research to become young scientists.

There aren't jobs for young scientists. And so that's going to be a whole gap.

The kind of damage they've done is going to take a very, very long time to fix. So I just think, you know, there are a lot of people that may have treatable cancers that can't get them.

It's, it's, yeah, there's a lot that we could do that we can't.

And that's going to have a ripple effect. It's going to have a ripple effect.
It takes a long time for research to be done.

There are research studies that have been stopped that, you know, won't get conclusions that could have been game-changing for somebody somewhere.

I think one of the things that scares me is this issue of young people who want to be researchers, who can't find a job somewhere or can't get the education that they want.

And then they go somewhere else and we don't get that talent anymore.

I think the U.S. is going to kind of backslide.

So we won't know all the things that happen, but it's...

There's a lot of options for bad.

Could you cook up a hypothetical?

I can do it. I was just like, what am I talking about? I mean, if there's another pandemic, where that's what I was going to say.
Yeah, that's the big one. It's like, we're short staffed.

You know, there's, let's say, so for

COVID,

I don't remember what the percentage was, but a very large percentage of CDC employees volunteered to go places to help. We are not required to do so.
It's not part of our salary.

We volunteered to go do things to help for COVID. And there are just fewer people to do that work.

The other thing,

what people don't realize is that 80% of the CDC's budget goes to state and local public health departments,

which means, you know, your state gets money from us likely. So they are able to do things that they need to do to support your community.

And they're not going to get all that money. There's a really great website called cdcdataproject.org and it talks about where that money goes.

And so you can look up your state and see what could be impacted there. And so that's

pretty major. Those health departments often aren't well funded, depending on the state you live in, and they're often overtaxed and

they need

the help. During COVID, I got to help with our public health department twice, and it was one of the best things I've done.
But it was hard.

All right, I want to give you a hug. I'm so sorry.
This fucking sucks. Thank you.

Thank you, Rachel.

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