In sickness and in stealth: threats to America’s CDC

0:11Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm Rosie Blore. And I'm Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. I say safe haven asset, you probably think gold. Fair enough. But it's not the only precious metal that investors are piling into. After many years in the shadow of gold, silver is on a bull run worth watching. And live albums that capture the excitement of the crowd at a gig used to be a big thing. But for a long time, most have preferred the carefully controlled environment of the studio. Now, as other parts of life become ever more curated, live albums seem to be staging a comeback.

1:02First up, though.

1:10Back in 2000, Measles was considered eliminated in America. But in the past month, the entirely preventable disease claimed two lives, an unvaccinated child and then an adult. Second death from measles to tell you about has been reported. This one is in New Mexico. It's one of many concerns for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, an internationally renowned agency charged with protecting public health in America. But since Donald Trump took office, DOGE, a not-really-government agency, has been making that job all but impossible. Our Southern correspondent, Rebecca Jackson, has been reporting not in, but rather near, the agency's headquarters in Atlanta.

1:56Reporting this story was different from the classic economist story. In fact, it was much harder. I learned pretty quickly that going through official channels like emailing CDC scientists simply wasn't going to get me anywhere. so I did things kind of unconventionally I printed out these notes that asked do you work at the CDC and would you be willing to talk confidentially to the economist about federal cuts and I pasted them on lampposts and parking signs and in coffee shops all around the CDC and in a couple affluent neighborhoods nearby and I also basically camped out there's a cafe across the street from the CDC, where lots of CDC people come on their breaks or for lunch.

2:38And so I stood there and asked people if they want to chat. Unlike many stories, when people are often at least willing to engage, the vast majority of people seemed terrified and answered me quietly saying, no, no, they certainly couldn't risk their job for this. Those who did agree to speak with me did so only on signal and usually anonymously. We had extensive conversations about how I could make sure that their names never got out. So before we get into what you learned from that reporting, let's wind back to the Trump administration's view on the CDC. Why is this a particular focus? To some extent, this is part of the slashes that we're seeing across the federal government.

3:17Doge is basically taking a hatchet to the federal workforce. But the CDC is also a little bit different. I was reading in Project 2025, which you might remember from campaign season, was the blueprint for Trump's second term written by the Heritage Foundation. And in it, Roger Severino, the head of domestic policy there, calls the CDC perhaps the most incompetent and arrogant agency in the federal government. It's true that at the very beginning of the pandemic, the CDC botched the first diagnostic test. They weren't able to get tests out as fast as they should have. And that certainly cost lives.

3:50But it later became a boogeyman of the culture wars for putting out mask mandates and rules around church and school attendance. For that reason, it's become particularly hated by Republicans and a focus for Doge right now. And with that onslaught then from Doge, what sense did you get of what the atmosphere is currently like inside the CDC? So I ended up speaking to about a dozen scientists, most of whom are still inside, a couple who have been recently terminated, and obtained nearly 100 emails of the communication between them and their leadership. Overall, I'd say there was an intense feeling of panic, confusion, and uncertainty.

4:29Many of the people who I spoke to talked about feeling a crippling anxiety that made it so that they couldn't even do their day-to-day job. And others were crying through the phone. Some of them sent me excerpts from Signal chats just between them and their coworkers. Everybody has moved to Signal because they're worried about sending any kind of messages over official email or chat platforms like Microsoft Teams. And some of these are pretty upsetting and get at how psychologically unsettling this whole thing has been, especially because many of Doge's emails come at night or over the weekends when people are at least trying to take a break from work.

5:05In one of the chats, one woman suggested to her colleagues that they should be like a cockroach, resilient and undeterred. But another said that she'd prefer to be like a bulldog when you keep smiling, even when you can't breathe. There was one story that I found particularly evocative of just how afraid people are. In mid-February, there was a very high-level boss who came back to her office after a meeting to find two men in Tesla t-shirts walking out. She didn't recognize them, and she asked them what they were doing in her office and who they were. One of them told her that they were just updating her computers.

5:40She thanked them profusely and said, oh, it's been giving me trouble for so long. But it hadn't been giving her any trouble. After that day, she and some of her colleagues decided to keep paperclips on their desk to see if anything had been moved. All of these stories together offer a disquieting case study of Doge's impact on the expertise housed in America's civil service. It is, as you say, disquieting, and it's all happened within such a short time. The first glimpse of what the Trump administration was after came on Inauguration Day. Trump signed a historic number of executive orders, but two in particular really impacted the CDC.

6:16The first was one about eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion, DEI, and the other was about getting rid of gender ideology extremism in the federal government. Scientists at the CDC scrambled to figure out how to comply with these. Part of what it meant was pulling back already submitted journal papers to make sure they had none of the DEI language in them or gender ideology language. It meant changing surveys to not reference gender and instead reference sex. It meant taking out pronouns from email signatures. But that wasn't the only thing. It wasn't just wokeness that took a beating.

6:49Right after inauguration, there was a pause on all public communication. And one senior scientist told me that that was basically when they stopped talking to anyone. They weren't allowed to go to conferences. They weren't allowed to speak publicly. They weren't even allowed to talk to their grantees, like state and local health departments who were running CDC programs on the ground. The guidance said that they couldn't communicate with anyone without explicit approval from a presidential appointee. On January 23rd, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, which is the agency's flagship publication that's come out every week for 60 years, was not published.

7:25The next day, the Trump administration named a CDC outsider as the acting director, and rumors spread that doge people were inside the agency. One mid-level employee told me that there was lots of informal chatter about how everyone should turn their phones on airplane mode and shut down their computers when they weren't working to make sure that none of their conversations were picked up. There was a real fear that they were being watched and tracked to see if they were saying anything about Trump. Where the threat presumably would be losing one's job. I'd say that's certainly what people are afraid of.

7:57So far, the layoffs have been rather typical, at least, of how they've been carried out in other parts of the government. First, there was the fork in the road email, as I'm sure listeners already know about, which offered this deferred resignation program. And like at other agencies across the federal government, OPM, the Office of Personnel Management, which is basically Doge's enforcer here, then fired probationary workers. So these are people who had been at their jobs for just a few years. But at the CDC, this also included people who had been recently promoted. So senior staff and even leadership who had come into their role, say, in the past year.

8:32The centers at the CDC were told that they needed to create a list of which of their newer underlings were mission critical, working on strategic priorities, or neither. One of the 10 centers came back and said that all of their probationary employees were mission critical. But the higher ups said that that was unacceptable and gave them percentages that they needed to meet. On February 15th, again, this came on a Saturday, 750 people got emails telling them that they were fired. You may have already seen these kinds of emails, but they cited inadequate and poor performance as the reason, which many of the people I spoke to were really offended by, especially because most of them had stellar performance reviews and their supervisors otherwise would certainly not have fired them.

9:16It's troubling given the CDC's role in protecting public health to imagine how it can even do its job under these kinds of pressures with this ever reducing staff. I think that's right. The reducing staff, the anxious staff, the lack of communication with state and local health departments. I mean, the CDC is this giant network that coordinates all these health efforts across the country and even across the world to make sure that diseases don't get to American shores. In some ways, the irony of this all is that the CDC kind of has an America First mission. And if the CDC is unable to continue that work, then things like the measles outbreak that we're seeing in Texas right now or the bird flu epidemic will just continue to rage.

9:59There is some sense amongst insiders that some degree of sanity has been restored, and that's partly by court order. Judges are starting to push back on some of the things that DOGE is doing across the federal government, CDC included. But that doesn't mean that things won't be grim. By mid-March, the agency needs to submit lists to OPM for two new phases of firings. Even bosses at the CDC have no sense. Will it be 10 percent? Will it be 20? Will it be 40? Will it be 60? If whole divisions are cut, then they don't know really how they would go on. As one laboratory scientist told me, public health is the mom of science.

10:36She does everything, and no one notices until she stops doing it. Rebecca, thanks very much for shining some light on this for us. Thanks for having me on, Jason.

10:58The kind of people who pile into gold are often confused with the kind of people who have a bunker, a generator, rations of canned food. Instead, think of them these days as simply shrewd investors. Gold prices have gained nearly 60 % in the past two years, outpacing all of the leading share indices. Gold is having a moment. The buying price of gold futures has hit multiple record highs this year. But while you're changing your views, consider the fans of a different, less precious element. Silver is a metal lots of investors might not be used to thinking of as a financial asset. Josh Roberts is our capital markets correspondent.

11:39It behaves a lot like gold does, but over the years, its returns have been much less good. In fact, traders refer to it sometimes as the poor man's gold. However, over the past year, it's actually kept pace with gold, and over the past five years, done even better. So now a lot of investors are paying more attention to this metal. Now, you said there that silver moves a lot like gold. I mean, what do those moves look like traditionally? Well, silver and gold have some common features. They're both precious metals. They're both attractive, they're rare, they're relatively unreactive. So they've both been used to make jewellery and coins for a very long time.

12:14What that means is that investors are used to thinking of these metals as a store of value. They can be a safe haven when investors are nervous about other things, if there's a banking crisis going on, or if there's inflation, or if there's geopolitical tensions, they tend to dash for these metals. Another thing they have in common is that they tend to go down in price when interest rates rise, because silver and gold, unlike other assets, they don't generate any income of their own. So if the income on cash goes up, the value of silver and gold tends to go down. And in fact, that's what we've seen over the past few years.

12:48They have been moving very similarly, although as I say, silver's been doing over some timeframes even better than gold. Right, but that's not what happened for all those similarities before this period. You said it's the poor man's version up. Yes, exactly. So before the past few years, silver had underperformed gold for a really long time. If you went back to the 1970s, say, you would have to sell 30 or 40 ounces of silver to buy one ounce of gold. Now that ratio is more like 90. So the relative performance of silver has really been a lot worse. And there have been other hiccups along the way as well.

13:20I said that silver and gold prices tend to move in line with each other. And they did, for example, for much of the 2010s. But hedge funds and other speculators who relied on that trend then got burnt quite badly in the second half of the 2010s when silver fell out of fashion and the relationship fell apart. So what is it that's changed now? Why is it tracking even outpacing gold now? Well, we're seeing a lot of big institutions being keen to buy silver as a safe haven asset. A good example of this is Russia's central bank. Lots of central banks around the world have been stocking up on gold for years, partly to hedge against geopolitical tensions and inflation, partly as an alternative to the dollar.

13:59Recently, though, we saw Russia's central bank being the first to announce that it would be holding silver in its reserves as well as gold. We hadn't seen that before. We're also seeing traders in New York very keen to snap up silver. A trend over the past few months has been that traders in New York have been buying gold bullion from vaults in London. So a lot of gold bullion has been moving over the Atlantic In fact, we've seen them buy silver at an even faster pace. They're buying it so quickly that it's worth loading bars of silver onto commercial flights to transport them from London to New York.

14:34So insofar as that is just a sort of supply-demand constraint on the price, how does that end? Does this just keep going? Where is the end for the silver run? Well, I'm not sure where the end is, but there's good reason to think that it might keep going for a while yet. For one thing, it's a safe haven asset. the world has become a more dangerous place. It doesn't look like becoming a calmer place anytime soon. So you would expect that to support the price of silver for a while. Another thing on supply demand, a difference between silver and gold, is that silver is much more heavily used by industry than gold is.

15:05In particular, it's used to make solar panels, and lots more of those are being made now. So if you look back over the past 10 years, the industrial demand for silver has gone up by 50%. The supply of silver, though, hasn't gone up at all. In fact, it's contracted slightly. and expanding mining capacity is a very slow process. In fact, silver is mostly produced as a by-product of other metals of mining, copper and nickel. But importantly, that can't change very quickly. So as demand rises, but supply stays roughly the same, you would expect the price rise to keep going. Josh, thanks very much for joining us.

15:39Thanks for having me.

15:51The Cure, Dua Lipa, Ed Sheeran, Interpol, Katie Mellower, Niall Horan, The National. On the face of it, these musical artists have little in common with one another, but all have recently released a live album. David Benin writes about music for The Economist. It's a format whose glory days were thought to be long gone. The studio album, for which new work is carefully recorded in controlled conditions, is now the big thing. You could argue that some of our greatest artists have reached their peak on live albums. You know I feel alright! You could think of James Brown's Live at the Apollo, containing tracks such as I'll Go Crazy.

16:39from 1963 that was a big seller that functioned as an advertisement for the live shows that were his bread and butter and sam cook's version of bring it on home to me from live at the harlem square club is radically different from the studio version it's so charged and exciting that his record company wouldn't release the album for almost 20 years because they were worried that it might ruin his smooth mainstream image.

17:18More recently, the live album has often been an afterthought, but that wasn't always the case in the 1970s and 80s, which was when rock music was at its peak. And the live album afforded artists an opportunity to bottle the lightning that struck when they performed in front of a crowd that maybe they couldn't always summon in the studio. There's also the question of just how live a live album really is. Producer Tony Visconti claimed that three quarters of Thin Lizzy's Live and Dangerous featuring Jailbreak was re-recorded in the studio, although the band have denied that.

18:01So why the slew of live album releases now? The pandemic may well have played a role in this. Katie Mellower, who recently released a live from the Albert Hall album, believes that the two-year dearth of live music has brought a renewed thirst for live music. She thinks from artists as much as from the fans. And she describes it as being like a new art form again. She also points out that a live album is edgier than studio work, because you only get one chance to deliver a performance. Another British artist to release a live album recorded at the Albert Hall is Dua Lipa, who showed her range by reimagining songs from her hit album Radical Optimism, such as Houdini, with orchestral arrangements.

19:03so even if live albums aren't the commercial force that they once were they still play an important role because the concerts are occasions that fans want to remember so the live album becomes a collector's item and a memento and the format benefits both fans and record labels because the fans get a means to relive the very likely quite expensive experience and record labels get the chance to charge them again for the pleasure.

19:48That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. Let us know what you think of the show. You can get in touch at podcasts at economist.com. We'll see you back here tomorrow.