“Everyone wants to describe the day that the light switch flipped and the CDC was sidelined. It didn’t happen that way. It was more of like a hand grasping something, and it slowly closes, closes, closes, closes until you realize that, middle of the summer, it has a complete grasp on everything at the CDC.”

—Kyle McGowan, a former chief of staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, ‘Like a Hand Grasping’: Trump Appointees Describe the Crushing of the CDC