STAT | M Stewart/AP
Armstrong said she and her colleagues have been talking about the CDC’s value in the past tense. “The CDC was a gem to the world,” she said. “That standing is gone. So much expertise is gone. People who wanted to go into public health don’t see a future. The debate that we’re all having is, will the CDC ever recover, not how long it will take. I don’t know that it can ever recover to what it was.”