MAHA's War on the CDC MMWR
The Corruption of an Essential Public Health Resource
Prior to 2020, the vast majority of Americans didn’t think too much about the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), one of our most essential federal agencies. As part of its day-to-day operations, the CDC operates as a sort of publishing house, producing data and statistics on a rapid basis. This information about the biggest threats to Americans’ health is deployed to assist doctors, nurses, and other health professionals in their day-to-day duties in something called the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR). This essential resource has long been a target of MAHA grifters, as we’ll soon cover.
On October 10th, 2025 the New York Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg reported via Bluesky:
“Friday night massacre underway at CDC. Dozens of ‘disease detectives,’ high-level scientists, entire Washington staff and editors of the MMWR (Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report) have all been RIFed.”
These are essential staff whose work is incredibly important in safeguarding the American public’s health. Half a year later, we see where this intentional sabotage has led. Playing Calvinball with public health, the parasocial menace Jay Bhattacharya has taken a break from neglecting his duties as Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to play pretend as the temporary Director of the CDC. Even after the legal constraints around Shameless Jay’s temporary appointment as CDC Director expired, he has been allowed to remain as a “shadow” CDC Director. This somehow involved recording even more podcasts on the taxpayer’s dime.
One of the few times he did bother to show up to work at the CDC is when he found yet another opportunity to censor science.
Unqualified Economist Faceplants…Again?!
Left in the hot seat, evidence that contradicted Jay Bhattacharya’s feelings slid across his desk after passing scientific review. Like clockwork, it was further proven that COVID-19 vaccines worked, reducing the likelihood of hospitalizations by half. Contrast this with the growing mountain of evidence that no benefit is conferred by repeated COVID-19 infections in pursuit of “natural immunity;” the basis of Bhattacharya’s entire pro-pestilence worldview. So just what is the nation’s smartest scientific mind, completely untainted by “ideology” (just after speaking at yet another white nationalist hate rally) supposed to do?
After years of making the evidence-free claim that he was the victim of censorship, dismissed by the Supreme Court, the dual NIH & CDC Director doubled down on his petty reign of censorship and blocked the study from publication in the CDC MMWR. This is a completely unprecedented abuse of authority he technically shouldn’t even have. When it became widely known that Bhattacharya had yet again engaged in censorship, the unqualified social media narcisscist took to his official Twitter account “NIHDirector_Jay” (seperate from “DrJBhattacharya,” where he blocks American doctors, scientists, and taxpayers to crack wise with trolls who regularly engage in harassment) to proclaim on April 22nd:
“There were no peer reviews. MMWR is not currently a peer reviewed journal. But we are working on changing that.”
This is a rather curious statement. I asked multiple doctors and scientists for input, who all responded with some version of the iconic Psyduck stare of confusion. According to Bluesky user “Shep/Polly,”
“I’m an author on several papers published in MMWR as well as other journals and this is a bald faced lie. The peer review process for an article submitted to MMWR is rigorous”
It should be a scandal that this shadow CDC Director is blocking publications of studies he personally doesn’t like after claiming he was “getting ideology out of science” and seeks to remake the NIH as “the research arm of MAHA.” Especially when he has zero relevant qualifications or experience to make such a decision, overriding those who do. In a softball interview with a fellow economist who struggles with basic arithmetic and champions repeatedly infecting unvaccinated children with SARS-CoV-2, Emily Oster, he exploited the safe space to ramble on about “test-negative design.” Oster, a bought-and-paid-for MAHA cheerleader, pretended he knew what he was talking about:
Now, you might be asking yourself: Why screw around with the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report?
Peer Review is for Economic Girly-Men! All of the Med Journals are Woooke!
MAHA “Doctors” have long hated actual medical research and the rigorous standards of the world’s leading scientific journals. Tweeting and podcasting is a lot easier than actual science, it turns out. These social media provocateurs insisted that their fact-free proclamations were more credible than mountains of peer-reviewed evidence. Jay Bhattacharya branded doctors and scientists as heretical “Covidians,” Martin Kulldorff proclaimed that the signees of the John Snow Memorandum, a consensus response to their useless online petition, were “disgraced,” and Vinay Prasad frequently made baseless accusations that his professional colleagues researching Long COVID were grifting fraudsters & that all the leading journals are “woke.”
Over the years, these pro-COVID “scientists” circumvented relevant peer review in a number of ways to mislead the public. Publishing in open-access journals without peer review, sharing pre-prints that had not been peer reviewed, publishing in journals totally irrelevant or unequipped for the subject matter of said paper, etc. were all tactics to exploit their social media audiences while avoiding rigorous scrutiny from peers with relevant credentials or experience. Imagine if a MMA fighter refused to compete against anyone over the age of 12, and then bragged that he was undefeated. Would you seriously consider them to be one of the world’s top fighters?
Disinformation artists then decided to start their own journal, brazenly called the “Journal of the Academy of Public Health” in Februrary 2025. (Misinformation Doctors Start a Misinformation Journal to Spread Misinformation - Dr. Jonathan Howard for Science-Based Medicine) Claiming to value “peer-review,” the rules insisted that only members of “the Academy of Public Health” can submit manuscripts, but the editor cannot reject these submissions no matter how negative the peer reviews are. The editor also has the power to decide who peer reviews said submissions. In other words, here’s a bunch of social media brats playing at starting their own propaganda mill. Needless to say, it was yet another quickly-forgotten astroturf grift.
The War on the CDC MMWR
Since the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic, pro-infection quacks have demonized the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, and targeted the CDC’s Morbidity & Mortality Weekly Report specifically. Instead of making meaningful lifesaving contributions of their own, these charlatans profited by lazily tearing down others. Knowing that their pseudoscience could not withstand the rigorous standards of peer review, these social media trolls promoted themselves by attacking the credibility of one of the nation’s most respected public health publications. This served as little more than sensationalist “infotainment” to their anti-vaccine fanboys.
On March 17th, 2023 Vinay Prasad squealed, “Latest CDC MMWR study on LongCovid in kids is trash,” while sharing sentiments that those suffering are actually “lying fake disease grifters.” The FDA’s current CDER Director Tracy Beth Hoeg, an unqualified sports physician who used her own child as a prop to attack the pediatric COVID-19 vaccine, proclaimed on Twitter on June 1st, 2023 that: “Next week I’m returning to DC to testify before congress about systemic problems within the CDC, their process for developing public health guidelines, errors made & the scientific integrity of MMWR,” before crowdsourcing “thoughts, ideas & reciepts” from her devoted anti-vaccine fanclub. On July 12th, 2023 Vinay Prasad and Tracy Beth Hoeg again attacked the CDC with a preprint (so, not peer-reviewed!) titled “Characteristics and quality of studies pertaining to masks published in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report,” shared by Tracy with another snarky tweet:
“Is CDCMMWR a reliable journal for informing health policy? In a new paper Alyson Haslam [Vinay Prasad] & I analyze 77 MMWR reports pertaining to masks. Our results were concerning. >75% concluded masks were effective w/only 30% testing masks. 0 were [Randomized Control Trials]”
Needless to say, anti-vaccine trolls such as Benjamin Ryan lept upon this non-peer-reviewed pre-print as confirmation of their conclusions. As it turns out, none of these creeps ever cared about peer review and never will. On November 15th, 2024 Vinay Prasad declared: “MMWR is less a journal, and more a propaganda newsletter.” Having spent most of the pandemic doing little more than producing a propaganda newsletter on Substack, this is quite ironic.
CDC MMWR’s MAHA Review
When Jay Bhattacharya insists that he will be introducing “peer review” to the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, what he actually means is that he will be tossing federal handouts to his favorite anti-vaccine cranks in order to form a MAHA review board for the CDC MMWR. Bhattacharya’s pathetically embarassing record of research output dating back to 2020, as well as the pitifully disgraceful studies he’s endorsed, show that he is woefully unfit for the task. Factual science will be censored, sensationalist anti-vaccine trash will granted undue legitimacy, and America’s healthcare workers will no longer be able to rely upon one of their most critical resources. We’ve already seen this with the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, and it’s clear that the long-term goal is to convert the CDC MMWR into an onramp of legitmacy for those who could only be published in the “Journal of the Academy of Public Health” previously.
While much of the nation’s energy is focused on Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and his constant obscene blabbering, his underlings are corrupting the essential functions of our federal public health agencies. As many breathe a sigh of relief that Trump is nominating a shockingly qualified & reasonable candidate to serve as CDC Director, she will be inheriting a compromised institution and given little leeway to right the ship. Should a crisis emerge under her tenure, she’s set up to be the obvious fall person. It’s a brutally unfair position to be in.
Imagine yourself in Jay Bhattacharya’s position: you’re the laughing stock of the entire world of medicine, science, and public health. Large parts of MAHA, your once loyal followers, are mad that their fantasies of the mRNA vaccines being banned and public executions of doctors & scientists were never realized. You’ve wasted your entire life to become a pathetically impotent old man who has zero talents beyond babbling on social media, desperately clinging on to relevancy. How else are you supposed to leave your mark on the world?
Final Verdict
The war on the CDC MMWR is yet another sad pathetic attempt to rewrite the rules for incoherent incompetents, sloppily written by pitiful manchildren.
