Politics

I knew things had changed at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in early 2018 when my routine request to interview a CDC scientist was held up for days on end. I’d been interviewing researchers there for decades and had never before hit a delay that meant missing my deadline. When I asked what was going on, I was told, off-the-record, that media requests were now being routed from the CDC press office in Atlanta up to the bosses at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in Washington, D.C., for approval.