In a commentary published by American Thinker, writer Lloyd Billingsley turns a skeptical eye on a CDC unit that most Americans have probably never heard of: the Epidemic Intelligence Service, or EIS. His central claim is structural β that the agency officially called the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is tasked with prevention, yet a key office tied to that mission doesn’t appear on the CDC’s own flow chart. From there, he builds a case that the EIS functions as what he calls the “covert division” of the CDC, and that the public deserves a fuller accounting of what its officers did in the run-up to and during the COVID-19 pandemic.
What the CDC says about the EIS
Billingsley begins with the agency’s own framing. The CDC describes EIS officers as its “disease detectives,” trained to work alongside subject matter experts while serving domestic and international partners. The agency points to a long visual tradition tied to the program: a worn-out shoe with a hole worn through the leather, a nod to officers personally investigating outbreaks at the local population level around the world. According to the CDC, the EIS has a 75-year history of training these disease detectives, who step up on short notice to investigate public health threats. The agency cites the Smallpox Eradication Program of the 1960s and a 2025 measles outbreak as examples of that work.
The piece seizes on one conspicuous absence from that official success story: the COVID-19 pandemic from 2020 to 2023. Billingsley argues the omission raises questions about CDC and EIS leadership.
Two names, two careers
Much of the commentary centers on two figures whose careers began in the EIS. The first is Dr. Anne Schuchat, who joined the CDC through the EIS in 1988. Billingsley notes she is widely thought to be the model for Dr. Erin Mears, the character played by Kate Winslet in the 2011 film Contagion. In 2016, Schuchat became the first head of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. She served as acting CDC director twice β from January 20 to July 7, 2017, and from January 31 to March 26, 2018 β without Senate confirmation, the piece states. CDC Chief Operating Officer Sherri Berger, per the commentary, called Schuchat “our Anthony Fauci.” Billingsley adds that Fauci himself, a government bureaucrat since 1968, was likewise never confirmed by the Senate, and that Fauci has praised Schuchat for what he described as consistency, competence, integrity, and for being “an anchor at the CDC.”
The second is Dr. Nancy Messonnier, who began her CDC career with the EIS in 1995 and later took over as NCIRD director. She was also the federal government’s first spokesperson on the pandemic. Billingsley describes a series of telephone briefings she held in early 2020, largely out of the public eye, that he says laid out much of what Fauci would later say publicly: a novel coronavirus had emerged from a market in Wuhan, China; there was no immunity to the new virus; it would spread rapidly; schools and businesses would have to shut down. Messonnier told reporters the CDC had maintained a team in China for years, according to the piece, but said she was “not at liberty” to discuss travel to the United States from Wuhan. Reporters, Billingsley writes, got no explanation of who exactly was setting the rules. Across sessions from January 7 to March 9, 2020, he notes, Messonnier never once mentioned the EIS β a unit whose officers, in his framing, had failed to detect the virus and stop its arrival in the country.
A resignation and a closed-door interview
In May 2021, Messonnier abruptly resigned from the CDC. Rochelle Walensky, then CDC director under President Biden, hailed her as a “true hero.” Messonnier moved to the Skoll Foundation, but members of Congress stayed interested. On October 8, 2021, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis interviewed her, with three attorneys from the WilmerHale law firm accompanying her. Billingsley notes she was not sworn in but was instructed to answer truthfully because false statements could lead to criminal prosecution. According to the redacted transcript, one of her attorneys advised her not to answer a question about a telephone call with CDC director Robert Redfield. Redfield, a Trump appointee and an experienced virologist, saw evidence of a laboratory origin for COVID and told reporters in June 2021 that he had received death threats.
Committee members wondered whether President Trump had interfered with Messonnier; she said he had not. She told the panel she began her career with the EIS and that her 2020 telebriefings were carefully scripted by a communications team of Dan Jernigan, Jay Butler, and Anne Schuchat. What she did not reveal, Billingsley stresses, was that all three of her scriptwriters were themselves EIS veterans. At the time, Schuchat was Principal Deputy Director of the CDC and was seen as a leading candidate to run the agency. It came as a surprise, then, that Schuchat resigned from the CDC in May 2021 β the same month Messonnier stepped down.
The costs, and the questions that follow
The commentary catalogues what Americans experienced in that period: businesses shut down with no warning or compensation; schools closed suddenly, costing students crucial learning time; workers and even service members fired for refusing vaccines that, in the author’s characterization, did not prevent infection or transmission; hospitalized seniors sent back into nursing homes where thousands died; and official instructions to mask, distance, and avoid gathering with loved ones. Through all of it, Billingsley argues, the public was never told that Messonnier β a decorated captain in the U.S. Public Health Service β was an EIS veteran, nor that her briefings were scripted by EIS veterans including Schuchat, a decorated rear admiral in the same service.
He also points to an October 2020 ProPublica report titled “Inside the Fall of the CDC,” which he says described the American and Chinese CDC as being “almost seen as one” during the pandemic. In her scripted briefings, he writes, Messonnier was careful to praise China and repeated talking points associated with the Chinese government. The public, he adds, was never told that the EIS includes nationals from many countries, including the People’s Republic of China β and neither Messonnier nor her team explained whose interests those officers represented, in his account.
The piece then turns to Fauci, asserting that he funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology to conduct gain-of-function research that makes viruses more lethal and transmissible. It notes that President Biden pardoned Fauci last year without indicating any crime, and that this year Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times. No such pardon was issued for Schuchat or Messonnier, Billingsley observes, and he argues Congress should now call EIS and CDC veterans to testify under oath.
He closes with a list of unanswered questions: When did CDC and EIS leaders know about the funding of gain-of-function work at the Wuhan lab? Is evidence of a lab origin for COVID part of a conspiracy theory? Were EIS officers embedded in the CDC’s China team, and for how long? Was anyone at either agency demoted, disciplined, or dismissed over the failure to stop the virus? What was it about travel from Wuhan that Messonnier was “not at liberty” to discuss? Did any officials delete communications or records? Has the People’s Republic of China ever done anything with which the CDC and EIS disagreed?
Billingsley’s conclusion is a rhetorical rebranding: strip “epidemic” from the name and call the agency the Centers for Deception Control. If nobody is held accountable and Congress does not break up what he calls a failed agency, he writes, the people lose and “white-coat supremacy” wins. The commentary is signed by Billingsley as a policy fellow at the Independent Institute in Oakland, California.
Source: www.americanthinker.com β https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/09/centers-for-deception-control/