America’s health system is flying blind and not prepared for the next big outbreak of infectious diseases, thanks to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s radical views and his handpicked “rookie” vaccine advisors, some of his former top experts have warned.
Weeks after quitting their jobs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, three of the agency’s former leaders have spoken out to warn about the dangers imposed by Kennedy and some of those who are advising him.
Accusing the Health Secretary of pushing policies that are not grounded in evidence, National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases Director Dan Jernigan said on Monday: “This administration has done a death by a thousand cuts.
“Those cuts have led to cuts in staff, cuts in resources, undercutting the science, and because of that, we find ourselves now without the people to do a big deployment (if an outbreak occurs),” he said.
National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases’ Demetre Daskalakis agreed, warning that health officials were “completely flying blind.”
“There’s no plan for what’s going to happen in January 2026 when the CDC and the rest of the US government pull out of WHO (the World Health Organization), and so we’re going to be flying both blind and deaf,” he added.
“That is what I think we’re the most worried about.”
The comments were made days after Kennedy’s handpicked Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices met last week to reshape policies for vaccines covering COVID-19, hepatitis B, measles, mumps, rubella, and varicella.
The group was formed after Kennedy fired all 17 members of the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee and installed several allies and vaccine skeptics in their place.
But their meeting came at a tumultuous time for the CDC after the agency’s boss, Susan Monarez, was forced out of her job for resisting Kennedy’s controversial policies.
Monarez’s departure sparked a mass exodus at the top of the agency, with Jernigan, Daskalakis, and Chief Medical Officer Debra Houry also leaving.
Speaking on a Zoom call on Monday, the trio said last week’s vaccine panel meeting—in which the group admitted they were “rookies”—confirmed their fears about how vaccine policy is being shaped.
“The people deciding vaccine policy for the United States should not be rookies. That was beyond disappointing and disheartening,” said Houry.
Daskalakis agreed. “Over 60 percent reduction in flu samples means that we don’t know what the next pandemic strain is going to be. We’re not going to be able to develop vaccines to be ready for seasonal flu or pandemic flu,” he said.
The chaos at the CDC has led to calls for Kennedy to resign. But the Health Secretary has defended the overhaul, telling a fiery Senate hearing this month that the agency had failed in its central mission: protecting Americans from infectious disease.
“America is home to 4.2% of the world’s population, yet we had nearly 20% of the COVID deaths,” said Kennedy, a known conspiracy theorist and vaccine sceptic.
“We literally did worse than any country in the world, and the people at CDC who oversaw that process, who put masks on our children, who closed our schools, are the people who will be leaving.”
Last week, Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices chairman Martin Kulldorff hit out at critics he said were falsely claiming they were made up of “unscientific and dangerous anti-vaxxers.”
Kulldorff, a former Harvard professor of medicine who lost his job after refusing the COVID vaccine, also challenged ex-CDC heads to debate him to prove they could be trusted.
“I suggest that you should only trust scientists that are willing to debate fellow scientists with different views,” he said.
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