OSLERSWEB.COM

CDC Scandal

The CDC scandal of the 1980s and 1990s was laid out methodically for all to see in Osler's Web, which was published in April 1996. Within a matter of days, Rep. Jerrold Nadler read a statement on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives referencing the charges made in the book and calling for a congressional investigation. He also wrote then Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala a letter asking for an investigation of the CDC, and later, arranged a meeting in his Washington office between Hillary Johnson and staff from the General Accounting Office (GAO).

See the documents related to Nadler's efforts, and the backstory, below...

CONGRESSMAN JERROLD NADLER:

WE LOVE YOU

A CHRONOLOGY...

Or: How a rogue CDC scientist, a journalist, and a U.S. congressman nailed an entire division at the Centers for Disease Control for conspiracy, fraud and lying to Congress.

Copyright © 2009 by Hillary Johnson, All Rights Reserved.

During the final years I was reporting Osler's Web, I was approached at a medical conference by the CDC's new chief investigator into "chronic fatigue syndrome," a former Naval officer, Ph.D. psychologist and agency-trained epidemiologist named Walter Gunn. The latter quietly asked me if I would meet him in his hotel room two hours later. I agreed. It was the last time Gunn and I allowed ourselves to be seen speaking to one another in public and the beginning of a three-year collaboration to expose the agency's theft of millions of taxpayer dollars earmarked for "CFS" research.

I had known since March 1987 that the agency was short-changing the public on the disease by refusing to pay for, or conduct, biological research and epidemiology on it. Yet, I was increasingly worried I would be unable to dig up definitive proof prior to publication. I defined such proof as official agency budget documents. Agency scientists themselves were occasionally letting the truth slip in interviews with me, but I wanted actual documents. After all,these same scientists might simply recant or claim they had been misquoted once the book was published.

By the time I met Gunn, I had filed myriad Freedom of Information Act requests for such documents, yet I had failed somehow to tap the appropriate vein, no matter how specific my requests. My office was crowded with cardboard boxes filled with paper from the agency, but none of it shed light on the discrepancies between the money coming into the agency--which was public knowledge--and what the agency was actually doing with the money, which was entirely mysterious.

When Gunn approached me, I knew immediately an angel had alighted on my shoulder. I didn't need to ask what he wanted; somehow, I knew. "There are things going on at the agency that need to be made public. There needs to be a congressional investigation," Gunn told me later that evening. I nodded. "I think you could be helpful," he added. I barely knew Gunn but his intensity caused me to believe I was in the presence of someone who had reached a turning point in his life. I knew Gunn would not be recanting. "Yes--great--of course," I responded. After nearly six years of reporting this story, someone in the enemy camp had renounced his allegiences and stepped forward to help me.

Gunn told me his conscience had been stung by his colleagues' behavior. He had pondered his action to reach out to a journalist for a very long time in hopes that his colleagues would retreat from their postures of malfeasance. He was a loyal agency employee, he indicated. Indeed, as I later realized, it was exactly Gunn's loyalty, his stature as a good company man, that had led his superiors to assign him to "CFS." They assumed he could be counted on to play the game. But they miscalculated.

"I don't want to hurt the CDC as an institution," he sought to emphasize that evening (a sentiment that flagged as his agency tenure came to its close three years later). But, he added, he could no longer remain a silent witness to the corruption in his own division.

Gunn was distraught, as well, over his colleagues' annual ritual of going before Congressional appropriation committees and lying about their progress in the disease in order to keep the money coming into the agency. Lying to Congress while under oath is a felony offense.

Gunn, for his part, ultimately revealed that he was stricken to his core by the cavalier criminality of his once-trusted colleagues. "If you don't believe the disease is real," he had implored them, "then don't take the money." When his co-workers ridiculed, then ignored, his concerns, he had taken the previously unimaginable action of going outside his own division for help, assuming the higher-ups at the agency would step in and set matters right. In a scenario reminiscent of the lonely, honest New York City beat cop, Frank Serpico, however, Gunn was initially reassured by top agency staff, but ultimately rebuffed, humiliated and, in time, punished by the highest ranking administrators at the CDC. He had sought me out only when it was apparent the corruption went, as Frank Serpico might have said, all the way up the chain of command.

Indeed, the misuse of millions of taxpayer dollars and the ritualized annual cover-up in Washington, D.C., Gunn by then knew and, eventually, I would learn, was occurring with the permission, apparently with the blessing, of the agency's second highest ranking official at the time, Walter Dowdle. The latter is now retired but during the period this abuse was occurring Dowdle was second-in-line to the directorship of the CDC.

At a future date, I will write about several remarkable aspects of my collaboration with Walter Gunn. For now, I will note that the definitive proof, when it came, appeared on a single page of paper that had not a word of prose, only columns of numbers on it. One weekend, Gunn and I sat together in his basement office in suburban Atlanta, his wife serving us coffee periodically, and studied that piece of paper for some time. Ultimately, Gunn cracked the "code" and was able to explain what the numbers on that Xeroxed paper meant. The house of cards that was the CFS research program at the agency came tumbling down before our eyes. Did we feel triumphant? Not at all. Shocked? yes. Troubled? yes.

I began to believe during those years of interacting with Walter Gunn, of listening to him speak for long stretches by telephone about his day to day observations of the machinations of his fellow epidemiologists and scientists, that the CDC had forfieted forever the right to lay claim over any aspect of this disease. I have seen nothing in the last decade to alter my view; indeed, policies and personnel--and dare I call it science?--at the CDC have only strengthened that view.

Immediately upon Gunn's departure from the agency, which was choreographed by the agency's public relations department so as not to appear to patients as if there had been any rancor between Gunn and his successors, CDC veteran William Reeves gave himself Gunn's job. Reeves has been principle investigator into "CFS" for seventeen years, now. He is perhaps the single most important reason "CFS" is considered a somatoform disorder or, more jocularly, "sickness behavior." Presumably Reeves will retire with full pension and perhaps an emeritus post in psychiatry at Emory University Medical School. Under Reeves' direction, the "CFS" research program at the agency collaborates with the medical school's "Mind-Body Program," a small unit within the schools' recently disgraced Department of Psychiatry.

Immediately after its publication in April of 1996, Osler's Web was brought to the attention of U.S. Congressman Jerrold Nadler's staff by Charles Ortleb, who was, in 1996, editor and publisher of The New York Native, and journalist Neenyah Ostrom. Ortleb's newspaper had assiduously reported on the AIDS epidemic in New York City and reporter Ostrom had monitored closely the simultaneous rise of "chronic fatigue syndrome." Nadler is a progressive democrat with a left-leaning constitutency that includes the Upper West Side of Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn, New York.

Shortly after I wrote to Nadler, he invited me to his Capitol Hill office to meet with three representatives from the General Accounting Office, the independent investigative arm of the U.S. Congress. The meeting took place on the afternoon of June 5, 1996 and lasted approximately two and one-half hours. Aside from myself and Jerrold Nadler, present were the GAO's Mary Hamilton Ph. D., Director of Operations, Director, Program Evaluation in Human Services; George Silberman, Assistant Director in Program Evaluation; and Richard Stana, GAO legislative advisor. At Nadler's request, I described to them the government's decade-long shell game with congressionally earmarked "CFS" money.

At the conclusion of this meeting, Mary Hamilton and her colleagues asked me to write an informal summary of the allegations made in Osler's Web for them. I complied, on June 8, 1996, sending a ten-page, single-spaced letter to them. In this document, I drew from my book the most salient points regarding both CDC and NIH's failure to research what they had named "chronic fatigue syndrome," their administrators' lies to Congress, and their theft and/or mismanagement of taxpayer dollars earmarked for basic research and epidemiology.

Next, Nadler wrote to the Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services requesting an investigation into the misappropriation of money by the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health.

"...(P)rogress in addressing the causes of CFS may have been hampered due to possible misuse of federal funds by these agencies..."

July 31, 1996 Congressman Nadler's request to the Honorable June Gibbs Brown, Inspector General, Department of Health and Human Services, for an investigation into misuse of funds. (914.9KB)

There is a surreal footnote to to this story. Nearly two and one-half years after Osler's Web broke the story of the CDC's theft of research funds in a national forum that included CNN and Newsweek, June Gibbs Brown, the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services, released the results of her investigation. Her findings confirmed the allegations published in Osler's Web.

Simultaneously, Willliam Reeves, a man Walter Gunn once described with unusual ferocity as "the biggest enemy of this disease at the CDC," stepped out of the shadows. He publicly claimed official federal whistleblower status--insuring that he could not be fired for his participation in the scheme--and then announced belatedly that the agency had been "misappropriating" cfs research dollars. To the poorly informed layperson, perhaps, Reeves achieved--if only temporarily--the identity of "hero." Reeves also sued his own boss, scientist Brian Mahy, for $400,000 for "harrassment."

The CAA, a patient advocacy organization based in Charlotte, N.C., claimed in their newsletter that Reeves "sought assistance" from CAA. He asked for the organization's help, CAA reported, in "taking his documents to the right people in government." The organization's newsletter reported that Kim McCleary and CAA lobbyist Tom Sheridan helped Reeves prepare for the meetings (with Rep. John Porter of Illinois and two North Carolina senators, Lauch Faircloth and Jesse Helms) and accompanied him to these meetings.

In the same newsletter (September/October 1998), Tom Sheridan noted that I had reported on the agency slush fund "back in 1996," but added that my evidence had been merely "anecdotal" and, also, had been acquired from the CAA's own "very surface level report in 1992." In fact, I alerted leadership at CAA to the on-going theft of funds, years before Osler's Web was published. Sheridan added that lobbyists had greater credibility than journalists, a very funny comment, apparently unintentionally so, that my journalist friends in Washington and I have enjoyed over the years.

CDC officials reassigned Mahy immediately, as well as several other agency staffers involved with the CFS scandal, but fired no one. The director of the CDC, Jeffrey Koplan, a political appointee who had not been at the agency when the strategy to steal research funds was concieved and executed, took it on the chin for the rest of the agency. Koplan initially attempted to justify the malfeasance to the Washington Post, claiming the money had been used to study "more important" diseases like "measles" and "polio." Soon after, assuming a more politically correct stance, Koplan apologized for the comments. Rep. John Porter expressed his shock and dismay to the Washington Post, although I had told Porter on at least two occasions during my interviews with him about the slush fund in Atlanta in the early 1990s. "But they are scientists," he once said incredulously. "Why would they do that?"

The General Accounting Office was the next entity to weigh in on the matter. The GAO's investigation of the CDC also supported the allegations of fiscal malfeasance in Osler's Web, and recommended that new accounting practices be instituted at the Centers for Disease Control.

FROM THE ARCHIVES features documents and correspondence acquired through Freedom of Information Act requests and other reporting--such as transcripts of taped interviews--gathered while reporting Osler's Web, circa 1986-1995. It is a reporter's effort to acquaint the curious with the historical record. As the sages have noted, absent an understanding of what occurred in the past, the same mistakes are likely to be repeated. With so many millions of lives at stake, it is critical to understand the ebb and flow of past events in order to confront the present with courage and conviction.

This material will include transcripts of interviews with high level government officials, internal documents from the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control, and other materials of significance to the history of the U.S. government's failed response to myalgic enceophalomyelitis/cfs and the impact of that failed response in other countries.

Currently, these materials are available nowhere else, as they were collected and developed by author Hillary Johnson during the nine years (1986-1995) she conducted her investigative reporting for Osler's Web.

Constituting an original and never-before-seen cache of historical material, these documents will be presented here to help future medical historians, policy makers, and professional journalists pursue this story with factual evidence that has been lacking in the lay press coverage of M.E.

In addition, these materials are offered to patients and their advocates to better help them understand why their disease has been stereotyped in the maintstream media as psychiatric in origin, behavioral, and less-than-serious.

ROTFLMAO
Instant Classic: A sample of comic genius, circa 1986, from the scientists at the Centers for Disease Control

"Dear Sirs,
I am sick..."

Never let it be said that the scientists at the Centers for Disease Control lacked humor in the early years of this emergent disease, the middle-1980s. Check out this notorious put-on--written by CDC staffers. (368.5KB)

Concocted by a CDC employee, the missive (above) was affixed to a bulletin board in the Viral Exanthems and Herpes Branch in the Atlanta agency's Building 6 (where "chronic fatigue syndrome" remains mired even today, twenty-three years later) for the staff's private enjoyment for the next two and a half years. After Walter Gunn, who was then the principal investigator into "CFS" at the agency, noticed a reporter copying portions of it into her notebook in 1988, he pleaded with his boss, Larry Schonberger, to remove the letter. Schonberger eventually did so, but only reluctantly. (For more about CDC epidemiologist Larry Schonberger and the extraordinarily influential role he played in 'disappearing' a disease he believed was a psychiatric phenomenon, see Osler's Web.)

By 1988 bona fide public inquiries about "chronic fatigue syndrome" to the Centers for Disease Control had surpasssed in number inquries about AIDS. Whenever a magazine or newspaper article appeared in the lay press about the disease, the agency would be forced to literally shut down branches of its bureaucracy and reassign staff to the task of responding to such inquiries. But, as is apparent from this letter--satirical though it may be--the agency was already fielding enough calls from desperate patients in 1986 to make the staff in Atlanta feel overwhelmed.