The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has canceled a plan to assist Texas schools in combating measles after some staff working on the agency’s response to this year’s record outbreak of the virus were told they could face layoffs, according to an agency employee.
CDC officials considered expanding a service they had been providing to Texas hospitals — onsite assessments to determine how errors in ventilation and air filtration were allowing the virus to spread — to other types of facilities such as schools.
“Being on the ground allows us to inspect the filters that are in place, as well as the HVAC systems, how they are set up, used, and monitored. And after seeing what we did, I’m glad we did,” Dylan Neu, the CDC’s ventilation assessment lead in Texas, told CBS News.
Neu is a biomedical engineer for the CDC’s National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, or NIOSH, which was largely eliminated by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s first round of layoffs earlier this month.
On March 20, two NIOSH experts—Neu and an industrial hygienist—were sent to Texas at the state’s request. They discovered a number of problems at Texas hospitals that had been actively treating measles patients during the outbreak, Neu said.
The agency’s teams conduct thorough inspections of the hospital’s facilities, assessing how air flows, he said, which can be difficult to do accurately over the phone with people who are unfamiliar with the technical details of how HVAC systems work.
In one case, a hospital isolation room was found to be incorrectly pressurized, allowing air to flow out of the room with the measles patient, Neu said. Another hospital overlooked an important step in installing an air filter in their waiting room: unwrap the filter before turning it on.
“They might say in an interview, ‘Yes, we bought HEPA filters. They have been running in the waiting room. But if they’re not actually out of the plastic bag, they’re not doing what they claim,” Neu said.
While Neu remains on the job for the time being, he received a notice from HHS on April 1 warning him that he could be laid off within the next few weeks.
“This action is necessary to align our workforce with the agency’s current and future needs and to ensure the efficient and effective operation of our programs,” Neu’s letter from the department stated.
Neu stated that he received the notice while in his hotel room in Texas, as he prepared to return from deployment. Most of his colleagues and the leadership at NIOSH have been laid off, reassigned to other agencies, or warned to expect cuts.
“My current understanding is that I’ll be working in the office until the end of this month, and then I’ll be on 60 days administrative leave until June 30th, and then we’ll be separated at that point,” he told me.
Agency officials scrapped plans to provide future ventilation assessments to Texas, he said, because he could be laid off while in the field and cut off from the agency’s systems.
A CDC spokesperson did not immediately return a request for comment.
While much of Neu’s team’s work at NIOSH is research-based, he says that experts on his team are frequently called upon to deploy to emergency situations as the agency’s primary experts on topics such as ventilation and contamination.
He described several previous deployments, including assisting hospitals across the country in developing plans to prepare for Ebola cases during the Obama administration and assisting the agency’s quarantine station at Detroit’s airport in the construction of an isolation room to screen passengers early during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We participate in almost every response that the CDC is involved in. NIOSH is called in to provide scientific expertise, particularly when there is an engineering or ventilation component,” he said.
The layoffs have also disrupted NIOSH’s ability to respond to requests such as health hazard evaluations, in which employers can seek assistance from the agency in investigating workplace health issues such as cancer clusters or fungal outbreaks.
The impact on the CDC’s measles response extends beyond NIOSH. CBS News previously reported that several agency employees assigned to the effort had been let go.
An official stated on Tuesday that the CDC is now “scraping to find the resources and personnel needed to provide support” to Texas and other states currently experiencing outbreaks.