CDC in turmoil after officials resign in protest of RFK Jr.’s vaccine policies. Embattled CDC director’s status unclear

Turmoil engulfed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) after Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sought the ouster of the agency’s recently installed director, prompting the resignation of at least three top officials and a walkout among CDC employees in Atlanta.

Earlier this week, Kennedy attempted to fire Susan Monarez, a career federal scientist with 20 years of government experience under her belt whom the Senate confirmed in July to lead the CDC. She had reportedly clashed with Kennedy over vaccines and personnel matters and was told to resign. In twist, lawyers for Monarez, who is the first CDC director to require Senate confirmation, argued that only the president could fire her.

President Donald Trump has yet to weigh in directly on Monarez’s fate.

Speaking Thursday at the walkout, Debra Houry, the former chief medical officer at the agency who resigned Wednesday, said she and her colleagues were fighting against staff and programming cuts and political interference. She said she is particularly concerned about vaccine policy. Kennedy, a long-time anti-vaccine activist, fired members of a key CDC advisory group and filled some of the vacancies with people who are noted vaccine opponents, including a board member of a prominent anti-vaccine advocacy group.

The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) makes vaccine recommendations that influence school vaccine schedules, insurance coverage, and a vaccine program for low-income children. At meeting scheduled for next month, the committee could make changes to recommendations for several important vaccines, including those for COVID-19 and hepatitis B, a possibility that has the public health community on edge.

“ACIP coming up is really one of the things that tipped us all,” Houry said. ” We are concerned about upcoming recommendations that probably have been made before we have the data and the science; we always follow the data and the science before we make recommendations.”

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Monarez has been fired. “What I will say about this individual is that her lawyer’s statement made it abundantly clear themselves that she was not aligned with the president’s mission to make America healthy again,” Leavitt said Thursday. But Trump had not spoken directly to Monarez’s situation by late Thursday.

Public health experts see Kennedy as frequently undercutting vaccination—he has offered tepid praise for the highly effective measles vaccine during an outbreak that began earlier this year and pulled hundreds of millions of dollars in funding from promising mRNA vaccine research, for example. They worry that the policies Kennedy is shaping at the CDC and other agencies under the umbrella of the Health and Human Services Department will erode trust in vaccines and make the country less able to respond to new and re-emerging diseases.

In a sign that some of Trump’s fellow Republicans may be growing uneasy with the direction of America’s public health enterprise, Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, a physician, called for the September vaccine advisory meeting to be postponed

“Serious allegations have been made about the meeting agenda, membership, and lack of scientific process being followed for the now announced September ACIP meeting,” Cassidy said in a statement released by the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions committee.

“These decisions directly impact children’s health, and the meeting should not occur until significant oversight has been conducted. If the meeting proceeds, any recommendations made should be rejected as lacking legitimacy given the seriousness of the allegations and the current turmoil in CDC leadership,” he said.

“While I recognize that the CDC Director serves at the pleasure of the President, I am alarmed that she has been fired after only three weeks on the job,” Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins said in a statement, according to the Maine Morning Star, a nonprofit newsroom.

Both Collins and Cassidy provided pivotal votes to confirm Kennedy at the start of the Trump administration. Cassidy, a doctor, received pledges from Kennedy related to vaccines, including that Kennedy would maintain the CDC advisory committee “without changes.”

The CDC officials who resigned together include Houry; Daniel Jernigan, the former director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases; and Demetre Daskalakis, the former director of the National Center on Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.

Houry said that she hoped the mass resignation would be a tipping point.

“If one of us retired, it would have been a blip. When the three of do it together it’s more powerful, and it just shows the state of our agency,” she said as she called on Congress to intervene.