An escalating conflict over an influential vaccine committee was one of the final straws that led to the firing of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Susan Monarez and the exodus of other highly regarded top officials.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had repeatedly undermined the agency’s independent Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, firing the committee’s members and appointing new members, including vaccine skeptics.
Early Wednesday, Monarez suggested to Dr. Richard Besser that she was going to be forced to sign off on new vaccine recommendations.
“She said there were two things she would never do in the job,” said Besser, a former acting CDC director and the CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. “One, in terms of firing her leadership who are talented civil servants like herself, and the other was to rubber-stamp ACIP recommendations that flew in the face of science.”
Hours later, Monarez was out, according to a Health and Human Services post on X. Almost immediately, several top officials resigned in protest.
One of those officials, Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, who directed the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases — which oversees vaccines — wrote in his resignation letter that a particular document related to the vaccine committee “ignored all feedback from career staff at CDC.”
The document was guidance for a newly formed work group that is scheduled to present Covid vaccine data and research at an ACIP meeting on Sept. 18 and contained anti-vaccine talking points. The work group will be led by newly appointed ACIP member Retsef Levi, an MIT professor who has been vocally against the mRNA Covid vaccines.
Daskalakis said in an interview that the new group members “were told that they have the ability to, quote, ‘prevent CDC bias from entering the work group.’ That’s unheard of. I don’t know what CDC bias is, because that’s not what we do. Our science is unbiased.”
Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., the chair of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee who was a key vote in Kennedy’s confirmation, said in a statement Thursday that the upcoming ACIP meeting should be postponed and called for “significant oversight.”
“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. “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.”
In an interview near the agency’s headquarters in Atlanta on Thursday, Dr. Debra Houry, the CDC’s chief medical officer, who resigned on Wednesday, said, “We reached our tipping point.”
“America’s public health is significantly in danger,” Houry said.
On Thursday afternoon, the White House appointed HHS deputy Jim O’Neill as the new acting CDC director, according to an administration official. The appointment was first reported by The Washington Post.
Hundreds of former and current CDC staffers, other public health workers and private citizens gathered outside the agency’s Atlanta headquarters Thursday to show respect for the officials who resigned. In addition to Daskalakis and Houry, Dr. Daniel Jernigan, the director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, also resigned.
The three made their way through the crowd of people who showed up to hug, applaud and shake their hands. Each spoke to the crowd to express gratitude for their support.
“We are going to be your loudest advocates!” Daskalakis said.
Jernigan, who’d been at the CDC for three decades, said in an interview that he’d been concerned that the administration had questioned the science that had long helped the agency make decisions about treatments and vaccines. “All of those past findings were being called into question and being reanalyzed in ways that we could not understand.”
In an email to NBC News, one of Monarez’s lawyers, Mark Zaid, said that Monarez was in Washington, D.C., at the time the Department of Health and Human Services announced her firing. Zaid declined to share details on what led up to HHS announcing her firing. He maintains that she “remains” director because the only person with the authority to fire her is President Donald Trump.
When asked whether Monarez would pursue legal action against the Trump administration, Zaid said, “We’re contemplating every available action but currently our position is she has not been properly or lawfully fired.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment on whether Trump would issue a statement on Monarez’s firing.
In an interview on Fox News on Thursday morning, Kennedy said he wouldn’t comment on the Monarez firing.
“It would be inappropriate for me to comment on a personnel issue,” Kennedy said. “What I will say is President Trump has very, very ambitious hopes for what, for CDC right now.”
Kennedy continued: “The CDC has problems. You know, we saw the misinformation coming out of Covid. They got the testing wrong. They got the social distancing, the masks, the school closures that did so much harm to the American people.”
The dispute between the Trump administration and CDC officials has caught the attention of lawmakers.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., the ranking member on the HELP committee, urged Cassidy to convene a public hearing to hear testimony from Kennedy, Monarez and the CDC leaders who resigned in the wake of Monarez’s ouster.
“The American people should hear directly from Secretary Kennedy and Dr. Monarez and every member of our committee should be able to ask questions and get honest answers from them,” Sanders said in a statement.
On Wednesday, Kennedy announced the Food and Drug Administration would limit the availability of Covid vaccines for the fall to adults at least 65 years old or people with underlying health conditions — a decision that upset some public health experts.
On MSNBC Thursday, Houry said that Monarez “was not allowed” to make updates and scientific improvements to vaccine work.
She said she became “concerned when Dr. Monarez was called to the secretary’s office after trying to” make changes.
Houry criticized Kennedy’s lack of visibility at the agency. When asked about his criticism of the culture at the agency, she said, “The CDC scientists are top-notch and excellent.”
“What we would actually have preferred was to have more interactions with the health secretary,” she said. Senior leaders “never were able to brief the secretary” on any of the issues the CDC deals with.