The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is coming undone. The White House announced last night that it had ousted the agency’s newly sworn-in director, Susan Monarez, whose lawyers insist that she still has her job because only President Donald Trump himself can fire her. (Yes, it’s a mess.) Four top officials resigned yesterday. Two of them—Demetre Daskalakis, who was the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, and Debra Houry, who was the chief medical officer—told me that the group quit together to signal that they believe science is being ignored and that public health is in danger.
The departures leave a leadership void that, according to current and former CDC officials, has demoralized the agency’s staff and will further undermine its ability to provide reliable guidance to Americans. As Lakshmi Panagiotakopoulos, who resigned from the agency in June as co-leader of a group that advises outside experts on COVID vaccines, told me, “It feels like the CDC is over.”
I spoke with Daskalakis this morning just before he and Houry were escorted from the CDC’s Atlanta headquarters. He told me that his decision to resign was prompted by a number of factors, including “the replacement of science with ideology” and “the sidelining of scientists so that their data cannot be seen.” He also fears that important information isn’t finding its way to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. According to Daskalakis, no one from his center had been allowed to brief Kennedy directly on any of the issues that it covers, including polio, measles, COVID-19, and various vaccines. “I’m not sure where he’s getting his information other than Substacks that are erroneous,” he said.
A spokesperson for Health and Human Services did not respond to requests for comment. In an interview with Fox & Friends this morning, Kennedy declined to comment on personnel matters. “CDC has problems,” he said, accusing the agency of spreading “misinformation” during the coronavirus pandemic. “We need to look at the priorities of the agency, if there’s really a deeply, deeply embedded—I would say—malaise at the agency, and we need strong leadership that will go in there and that will be able to execute on President Trump’s broad ambitions.”
The CDC had already been in turmoil for months before this week’s departures. Health workers at the agency were caught up in the Trump administration’s mass government layoffs earlier this year. In June, Kennedy removed all 17 members of a respected vaccine-advisory committee and appointed eight new members, including Robert Malone, a prominent COVID-vaccine critic who believes that the United States government has “reality-bending information-control capabilities,” and Vicky Pebsworth, who, like Kennedy, has a long history of insinuating that vaccines can cause autism despite decades of high-quality studies refuting that connection. In response, CDC workers and alumni protested outside the agency’s headquarters, calling for Kennedy to resign. Then, early this month, a 30-year-old man who blamed COVID vaccines for his depression fired nearly 200 shots into the campus, killing a police officer. A letter signed by hundreds of CDC employees after the shooting objected to the “politicized rhetoric that has turned public health professionals from trusted experts into targets of villainization” and accused Kennedy of being “complicit in dismantling America’s public health infrastructure and endangering the nation’s health by repeatedly spreading inaccurate health information.” (After the shooting, Kennedy posted a statement on X in which he lamented the shooting and the officer’s death. “Public health workers show up every day with purpose—even in moments of grief and uncertainty,” he said. “We honor their service.”)
Yesterday’s attempt to remove Monarez as director was the last straw in the four officials’ decision to resign, Houry said. (Along with Houry and Daskalakis, the resignees include Daniel Jernigan, the director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, and Jennifer Layden, who oversaw the agency’s Office of Public Health Data, Surveillance, and Technology.) Houry told me that officials across the CDC were excited for Monarez to take the helm when she was confirmed last month. At the time, Kennedy praised her as a “public health expert with unimpeachable scientific credentials” and a “longtime champion of MAHA values.” (She was apparently not the administration’s first choice for the position: Before nominating Monarez, the White House withdrew the nomination of David Weldon, a physician and former congressman, over concerns that his anti-vaccine views would undermine his Senate confirmation.) Then, just weeks later, Monarez was shown the door. “When we knew that her job was in jeopardy, that we weren’t going to have scientific leadership anymore, that was the final tipping point for us,” Houry told me. “We could not stay if there was not a scientific leader at CDC.”
A statement from Monarez’s lawyers said that she had been targeted by Kennedy because she “refused to rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives and fire dedicated health experts.” Yesterday afternoon, a post on the Health and Human Services X account said that Monarez was “no longer director” of the agency. But Monarez’s lawyer said that, even though she had been notified by a White House staffer that she’d been fired, she believes that her termination has to come from President Trump himself. A statement from the White House spokesperson Kush Desai said that the director had been fired after “refusing to resign despite informing HHS leadership of her intent to do so.” The statement also said that Monarez is “not aligned with the President’s agenda of Making America Healthy Again.” (Monarez didn’t reply to an interview request.)
Last night and this morning, current and former CDC employees told me that many scientists who remain wonder how they will continue, and whether the agency is still dedicated to providing science-based guidance to the nation. “People are at their wit’s end, and there has been trauma after trauma after trauma,” one longtime CDC official, who asked not to be named for fear of repercussions from HHS, told me today. “I just don’t know how much more our staff can take.”
Daskalakis and Houry told me that they had stayed at the agency despite their misgivings about Kennedy’s views and concern about those he appointed to key positions. They stayed after he cast doubt on the safety of the measles vaccine amid the nation’s largest outbreak since the disease was declared eliminated in 2000. They stayed after he canceled $500 million in funding for mRNA-vaccine development. They felt that as long as they were able to put out accurate data, remaining at the CDC was worthwhile. But after Monarez’s ouster, they no longer believe that’s possible.
They leave behind an agency that is now even more vulnerable to political interference, with fewer people standing between Kennedy and the career scientists whose work he has repeatedly maligned. Current and former officials I spoke with expect more resignations to come.
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