Health
Inside the C.D.C., a Final ‘Love Letter’ Before Mass Layoffs
The agency’s injury center was among the departments that were largely gutted in Tuesday’s wave of dismissals. Read a staff member’s letter to colleagues while they awaited their fates.
When every email inbox in the division pinged with a new message at 5:07 p.m. on Friday, the staff collectively held their breath.
A love letter to the Division of Violence Prevention
Read Document 2 pages
But it wasn’t the dismissal notification that these employees of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had been waiting for. Quite the opposite: It was, the subject line said, a “love letter.”
Full document: Read the letter
The author was Sarah Roby, a health communications specialist in the C.D.C.’s injury center, and the note would be read and reread throughout the weekend by her colleagues as they awaited their fate. The recipients worked in the injury center’s division of violence prevention, which focused on driving down rates of child abuse, sexual violence and gun deaths by collecting data, funding research and rolling out state and local programs that used evidence-based strategies.
Full document: Read the letter
