Early one morning in April, John Weiser checked his email, worried that a colleague at the Division of HIV Prevention at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) was on the list for another round of firings.

That’s when he found his own termination notice.

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Weiser, a 14-year CDC veteran who ran the agency’s Medical Monitoring Project, a surveillance system that’s the sole source of nationally representative data on people with HIV, had been suffering along with everyone else at the health agency due to Elon Musk’s DOGE cuts.

“We were ordered to send five bullet points each week describing our accomplishments during the previous week or face termination,” Weiser wrote in an essay published in The Journal of Infectious Diseases. “Management provided careful guidance about how to craft the five bullets to satisfy the AI model that would presumably be reading them from over a million civilian government employees. But I knew giving in to this absurdity would only lead to more bullying.

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“So, I declined to submit my bullet points.”

It was the first among a number of decisions Weiser made at the CDC that would test his fidelity to science and oath to do no harm.

Weiser started his medical career at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, when he “consoled the newly diagnosed and sat with the dying,” as he put it.

While science has since provided the tools to end the HIV/AIDS epidemic, those on the margins are still at risk. Trans people, in particular, suffer from the disease at greater numbers than other populations.

That’s where the Medical Monitoring Project (MMP) came in, providing vital data to address those discrepancies.

But at the CDC under the Trump administration, trans people were no longer recognized. Trump’s executive order “Defending Women from Gender Ideology” erased trans identity from the federal government, acknowledging the existence of only “two genders, male and female.”

Beginning in February, CDC staff “scurried to erase data about transgender persons from numerous existing surveillance reports and research papers, and to stop collecting information about the gender of MMP participants.”

Weiser questioned CDC leadership’s response to the administration’s exclusionary policies in a meeting about the purge.

“Would we suppress data about Black Americans if directed to do so? I asked if leadership was advocating for scientific integrity. The reply from the official leading the meeting was clear: We would comply with the directive.”

Ironically, even that compliant official was removed from his position after 30 years of service at the CDC.

Weiser had been preparing a paper based on MMP data that addressed opiate use among transgender people with HIV. Data showed those individuals didn’t receive drug treatment in numbers comparable to other populations. Research indicated that addressing that disparity could improve outcomes targeting HIV transmission.

“We were getting ready to publish this study, but when I put the paper through CDC’s clearance process, I was told to remove data about the prevalence of opioid misuse among transgender people,” Weiser told POZ magazine.

“I thought carefully about that, and I decided not to do that, because it’s bad science to suppress data for ideological reasons and because erasing people from the story harms actual people. I thought about my transgender patients and how I would face them, and what I would say to them while I’m sitting with them in the exam room, knowing that I had erased their existence from the CDC.

“I withdrew the paper,” he said.

In May, the Trump administration ended funding for the Medical Monitoring Project.

After being fired and then brought back to the agency in June, Weiser ultimately resigned.

“I knew this was no longer the best place for me. I could do more good by spending extra time taking care of my patients,” he said.

He was also dismayed by colleagues who fell in line with orders to purge trans people from data and acceded to other demands to corrupt the science that the CDC exists to do.

“People making these decisions are in a really tough spot. They want to do what’s best for their programs. They want to do what’s best for their employees. They want to do what’s best for the people they’re charged with taking care of. Those are careful decisions that need to be made weighing all of the considerations,” Weiser said.

“What I want these leaders to do is also consider how a decision to essentially throw one group of people under the bus undermines scientific integrity and harms everyone.”

The CDC’s decisions to comply with Trump directives corrupt science, but also corrode society more generally.

Weiser cited trans Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen’s take on autocracy.

“Gessen explains how decisions to go along with harmful demands, as I witnessed at CDC, are not made because people are unethical or naïve. These are rational choices made within an irrational and intimidating system. And they are often values-based. People choose to go along to save what’s left of an institution, to protect their families, or to keep their jobs, even if it means sacrificing principles.

“But this gradual process of adaptation and compromise, Gessen warns, is what ultimately solidifies an autocrat’s power.”

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