More than 1,000 current and former workers at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) have signed a letter urging vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy to resign as head of the agency for “endangering” the nation’s health.
The letter, addressed to the under-fire health secretary and members of Congress, calls on Kennedy to step down while citing a series of controversies that have plagued HHS during his tenure.
Among the concerns are his appointments of several vaccine skeptics and COVID-19 conspiracy theorists to top positions, his attempts to overhaul national vaccine policy, and his firing or forcing the resignations of numerous experts, including Susan Monarez, the former head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
“Should he decline to resign, we call upon the President [Donald Trump] and U.S. Congress to appoint a new Secretary of Health and Human Services, one whose qualifications and experience ensure that health policy is informed by independent and unbiased peer-reviewed science,” the letter states. “We expect those in leadership to act when the health of Americans is at stake.”
The letter follows an earlier appeal from hundreds of HHS employees, who accused Kennedy of putting “everyday Americans in danger” and “spreading inaccurate health information” in the aftermath of a gunman’s attack on CDC headquarters in Atlanta on August 8.
The workers further accused Kennedy and his “Make America Healthy Again” allies of deliberately “sowing public mistrust” in the CDC, including calling the agency a “cesspool of corruption.” They also set a September 2 deadline for Kennedy to stop disseminating “false and misleading claims about vaccines” and to ensure the safety of the HHS workforce.
“But Secretary Kennedy continues to endanger the nation’s health,” the latest letter states, before outlining several examples. These include attacking the American Academy of Pediatrics for recommending COVID-19 vaccines for children and discrediting HHS by claiming last month that “trusting experts is not a feature of either science or democracy.”
In response, HHS Communications Director Andrew Nixon told the Daily Beast: “Kennedy has been clear: the CDC has been broken for a long time. Restoring it as the world’s most trusted guardian of public health will take sustained reform and more personnel changes.
“From his first day in office, he pledged to check his assumptions at the door—and he asked every HHS colleague to do the same,” Nixon added.
The letter arrived just days after nine former CDC directors published a scathing op-ed in The New York Times, condemning Kennedy’s firing of Monarez—who clashed with him over vaccine policy before being dismissed after only a few months—and described her ousting as “unlike anything we had ever seen at the agency and unlike anything our country had ever experienced.”
They also hit out at Kennedy for downplaying the importance of measles vaccines amid outbreaks of the disease, firing thousands of federal health workers, and ending U.S. support for global vaccination programs.
The group called Kennedy’s actions “unacceptable” and warned that they should “alarm every American, regardless of political leanings.”
Trump himself has acknowledged the turmoil surrounding Kennedy’s leadership, writing on Truth Social Monday that the CDC is “being ripped apart” over disagreements about vaccines.
The White House has been been contacted for comment by the Daily Beast.
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