Amy Maxmen

Amy Maxmen is a national public health correspondent at KFF Health News who reports on how systems outside hospitals shape disease prevention and everyday health. Her coverage tracks outbreaks and health threats through the schools, workplaces, farms, and government agencies that are supposed to keep people safe, showing where those defenses fail. She brings a long background in global health and science reporting to stories that explain why policies, politics, and inequities make some communities far more vulnerable than others.

Vaccine-preventable disease comebacks

Maxmen devotes sustained reporting to the return of measles in the United States and the strain it places on families, clinicians, and schools. In Utah she follows a long-running outbreak, interviewing anguished parents and pediatricians who describe frightened children, exhausted staff, and classrooms reshaped by disease control measures. She places those local scenes in a national context, explaining how vaccine hesitancy, misinformation, and uneven public health guidance have pushed measles toward levels not seen in decades and threaten the country’s measles-free status.

Her measles stories examine how federal and state decisions - from CDC communication to a surgeon general memo that defers school attendance decisions to parents - shape whether outbreaks are contained or allowed to spread.

Bird flu, biosecurity, and respiratory threats

Bird flu is another recurring focus, where Maxmen combines investigative work with clear explanations of evolving science. She reports on how immigration raids and threats against farmworkers obstruct efforts to detect bird flu infections, undermining a key defense against a potential pandemic.

Her coverage of outbreaks on dairy and poultry farms follows sickened workers, missing CDC analyses, and emails showing health departments struggling to track human infections in deference to agricultural interests.

She highlights international contrasts, such as Finland offering bird flu shots to farmworkers, to show policy choices that reduce risk but remain unused in the U.S. Beyond bird flu, she explains new frameworks for airborne disease transmission and what they mean for ventilation, masking, and other costly measures that determine whether respiratory infections keep spreading. She continues to cover covid as a persistent killer, describing how responsibility for staying safe has shifted onto individuals even as thousands still die.

Public health agencies, politics, and accountability

Maxmen repeatedly scrutinizes how political decisions weaken public health agencies and leave communities exposed to outbreaks.

Her reporting on CDC data delays and the halt of the agency’s key scientific report shows how freezes and silence around influenza and bird flu analyses hinder doctors and policymakers as outbreaks escalate. She traces turmoil at the CDC under President Donald Trump, including leadership changes and staff concerns about interference, in both written coverage and broadcast segments. In stories on proposed U.S. exits from the World Health Organization and shifts in health budgets, she explains how withdrawing support and reshaping aid undercuts global and domestic health security while ceding influence to other nations.

Her work on federal heat rules, budget maneuvers, and fragmented immunization policies connects bureaucratic decisions to real-world consequences for workers, patients, and outbreak control.

Patients, workers, and inequities in care

Alongside agency coverage, Maxmen spends substantial time with people living through health system failures. She co-reports on women who develop post-mastectomy pain syndrome after breast cancer surgery, documenting how a poorly understood condition leaves tens of thousands coping with long-term, disabling pain and inconsistent treatment.

Her investigations into nursing aides and other frontline workers describe lasting trauma from hazardous jobs during the pandemic and the lack of support for PTSD and related conditions. She writes about laborers suffering in extreme heat, showing how employer decisions on shade, water, and breaks determine whether workers survive harsh conditions. Features on public health workers assigned to detention centers, including Guantánamo, reveal moral distress among clinicians and the bleak conditions in which they practice. In pieces on widening gaps in life expectancy and HIV data suppression, she connects health inequities and censorship of science to broader questions of who benefits from policy choices.

Her earlier work in global health and infectious disease reporting informs these stories, bringing a lens that ties local events to worldwide patterns in disease, poverty, and access to care.

Maxmen’s body of work sits at the intersection of investigative public health reporting and explanatory science writing, grounded in detailed interviews and documentary evidence. Her stories often run at national scale but retain the texture of individual lives, making complex health threats legible without losing their human stakes.