For 715 consecutive days — every single day — I put on full protective gear in the ICU at Houston’s United Memorial Medical Center, fighting COVID-19 on the frontlines. I never took a day off, because when lives hang in the balance, doctors don’t get the luxury of excuses. We act. We fight. We serve.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was created to serve with that same urgency — to protect Americans from infectious disease through science, transparency and rapid response. But what the public got instead during the pandemic was an agency more obsessed with narratives and control than with saving lives.

During the pandemic, the CDC didn’t just make mistakes — it fundamentally betrayed its mission. It manipulated data, censored debate and colluded with Big Tech to silence dissenting physicians. That isn’t science — that’s politics and narrative-control masquerading as public health, and it comes at a dear cost to this nation.

That’s why HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy must enact a forceful and immediate, top-to-bottom house cleaning.

Consider just a few of the documented failures.

The CDC released COVID-19 test kits with internally known fundamental defects, contributing to catastrophic delays in detecting the virus.

It shifted guidance back and forth on whether to require masks — not based on any evidence but under political pressure. This helped destroy public trust.

Then there’s the data manipulation — at least 25 documented statistical errors, 80 percent of them exaggerating the severity of the pandemic.

The agency suppressed transparency, refusing to release full vaccine injury data because the public “might misinterpret it.”

It colluded in censorship, training Facebook, X, and Google employees to erase posts from experienced physicians who challenged CDC orthodoxy.

It surveilled U.S. citizens, buying massive location-tracking databases to monitor lockdown compliance.

It also buried risk data, scrubbing evidence of myocarditis risk from the vaccine and overcounting child deaths from the virus. This fueled destructive school closures and unnecessary child masking.

These are not minor missteps. They represent institutional malpractice — an agency actively choosing political control over scientific honesty. It has cost countless lives.

Even as frontline doctors treated wave after wave of patients, the CDC insulated itself behind bureaucratic walls, doubling down on arrogance and ideology. Instead of humbly correcting course, the agency turned inward, obsessed with power and control.

The result? Americans no longer know if they can trust the very institution designed to protect them. Public health depends on trust. Once lost, it is nearly impossible to rebuild.

Again, that’s why Kennedy must take bold action now, at this juncture, to restore integrity. That means purging the political operatives and career bureaucrats who turned the CDC into a fortress of ideology. It means bringing in real doctors —leaders with actual hands-on clinical experience, not detached administrators or partisan activists. It means requiring full, unredacted release of all data — good, bad or inconvenient.

In short, to rebuild trust, Kennedy must make sure the CDC is putting patients and science first, not politics and profit.

The CDC desperately needs leaders who understand their first duty is not to narratives, not to politicians, and not to authority or control, but to the health and well-being of the American people.

The CDC’s failures during the COVID-19 pandemic were not just bureaucratic errors. They were betrayals that cost lives, undermined freedom and shattered trust. Unless we act now, the next public health crisis will expose an even weaker, more distrusted CDC — one that Americans may simply ignore from the outset.

As a doctor who has dedicated my life to saving patients, I will not stand silent. The American people deserve a CDC worthy of its name, that works harder to control diseases than it does to control narratives.

Dr. Joseph Varon is president and Chief Medical Officer of the Independent Medical Alliance. He spent 715 consecutive days in full protective gear, fighting COVID-19 cases as the Chief Medical Officer in charge of the ICU at Houston’s United Memorial Medical Center.

Thousands of people descended on the White House during a Saturday march from Malcolm X Park to Lafayette Park in protest of the Trump administration’s crackdown on crime in the nation’s capital. 

Demonstrators entitled the effort “We Are All DC,” representing the potential ripple effects of military force on local citizens, spurred by the president. 

“Today, in defense of the people and communities living under a military take over of DC, we join in sending a clear and peaceful message: the American people will not bow to dictators. We are in solidarity with our neighbors and Black, Brown, immigrant, and other communities targeted. We will march, we will resist, and we will peacefully protest,” Democracy Forward wrote in a statement on X.

Throughout the past several weeks, soldiers have patrolled the streets as federal agents have worked to set up traffic stops with police and detain individuals deemed to be homeless or illegal immigrants. 

“DC communities are joyful, powerful — and we’re under attack,” a statement from “Free DC” read in promotion of the Saturday march.

“Armed National Guard soldiers are carrying guns through our neighborhoods. ICE and FBI agents are profiling, harassing, and violently arresting our neighbors. MPD is going after children just for being outside, and every hour that goes by is an hour when people here are in danger,” it added. 

Large groups of protestors flooded the streets with signs as they chanted quotes of outrage against the current administration. 

“Our nation’s capital is a place people call home—not a militarized zone. We’re demanding an end to Trump’s takeover of DC and calling on Congress to finally give DC the statehood it’s owed,” the League of Conservation Voters wrote on X.

On Friday, Republicans unveiled a series of legislation set to overturn Washington, D.C.’s self-governance by requiring the DC Council to submit all proposed bills to Congress for review. 

GOP lawmakers are also attempting to lower the age of juveniles who are eligible to be tried as adults while ensuring harsher punishments for those defacing federal public property. 

DC Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) also signed a Tuesday order extending partnerships with federal law enforcement agencies to establish a chain of communication between local leaders and national heads. 

City council members opposed the move, as have most local residents who say the increased police presence is unnecessary.

Still, President Trump’s deployment of Washington National Guard troops to patrol the nation’s capital has been extended through December to ensure that service members receive the full scope of benefits for the mission, according to multiple news outlets.