The most interesting CDC departure isn't a Satanist

It's a staffer connected to vaping illness and SARS-CoV-2 transmission studies

Corrections in bold font, made 2 September 2025.

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I get why the notion of a supposed Satanist at the CDC captivates people. The meme fodder alone is fantastic.

For me, though, it’s just another act in the social-media sideshow. What really draws my attention is the departure of Dr. Jennifer Layden.

Layden came to CDC from my state, Illinois, where she had worked for the state Department of Public Health from 2016 to January 2020, as state epidemiologist and chief medical officer. She then served as deputy commissioner and CMO for the Chicago Department of Public Health, and the incident manager for the city's COVID-19 response, before starting at the CDC in September 2020. Resume below from Congress.gov

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Leyden was gone from the state position by the time “15 Days to Slow the Spread” rolled around, so; I learned her name not from her being at IDPH or CDPH press conferences, but from several studies I examined later.¹

Layden and Vaping-Related Illness (aka, EVALI)

Layden is the lead author of a New England Journal of Medicine report on the still-unexplained vaping illness, which examined cases in Illinois and Wisconsin in early summer 2019.

I spent some time investigating the illness alongside other digital sleuths. In the course of investigating the illness further, I emailed Layden in April 2022 with a question about data in the supplementary material. I didn’t know she had left IPDH and was unsuccessful in getting her new whereabouts by contacting a co-author.

At the time, like researcher Rossana Segreto, I suspected the vaping illness might stem from an interaction between vaping agents and a leaked SARS-CoV-2. I later abandoned both the idea of a novel SARS virus causing disease anywhere, and the notion of a lab leak. By early 2024, colleagues and I proposed the reverse: that vaping injuries from contaminated agents were later covered up by blaming SARS-CoV-2.

Now, I lean toward two possibilities: contaminated vapes either arose accidentally and were covered up by the U.S. government, or they were introduced deliberately, either as a public-health “test” exercise or as a planted fallback story to explain the virus’s supposed early spread.

My outstanding questions for Layden et al concern the total number of patients who underwent respiratory pathogen testing and whether any of the excluded cases produced positive results.

The “First Known” person to person SARS-CoV-2 transmission

Layden also co-authored the Lancet study that claimed to document the “first known” person-to-person transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in the United States: a Chicago couple.

I say “claimed” because a later Nature study — which Layden likewise co-authored — included the same couple and showed that their viral “sequences” did not cluster together in the phylogenetic tree, suggesting the wife had not transmitted the virus to her husband. More on that here:

Questioning the "First Known Person-to-Person Transmission of SARS-CoV-2"

I challenge the WHO’s claim that there was ever solid evidence the agent named SARS-CoV-2 transmitted from person to person. It appears that then-HHS Secretary Alexander Azar backdated his Public Health Emergency to 27 January 2020 because that was the date the CDC concluded the Chicago wife had infected her husband. If that conclusion was unfounded, then the legal and political trigger for the emergency is falsified.

If I Get One Choice…

So yes the guy on the left is (seemingly) far more interesting than the gal on the right.

But if I get 15 minutes to ask just one of them a list of questions, my choice is Dr. Jennifer Layden, former director of the CDC Office of Public Health Data, Surveillance, and Technology (OPHDST) and leader of the Data Modernization Initiative (DMI).

And I could not care less if she has tattoos.

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Related thread: https://x.com/Wood_House76/status/1962643574094233827

1. Added 2 September 2025: I haven’t searched early CDPH press conferences; Layden may have been in attendance or spoken at those. I’m speaking to how I learned and became familiar with her name. If I recall correctly, in the first six months of 2020, I tended to focus on what was being said at state (IL) and national press conferences.