Four senior officials with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced their resignations in recent days, citing what they described as growing political interference in the agency’s scientific work, particularly regarding vaccines.
Two of them — Debra Houry, the CDC’s chief science and medical officer, and Demetre Daskalakis, who led the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases — stepped down on Wednesday, hours after the White House announced the firing of CDC Director Susan Monarez.
Monarez, confirmed by the Senate in late July, was removed less than a month into her tenure. White House spokesperson Kush Desai said Monarez “was not aligned with the President’s agenda of Making America Healthy Again.” Monarez’s attorneys argue the dismissal is unlawful, asserting that only the president can remove a Senate-confirmed director.
On Thursday, Jim O’Neill, the deputy secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, was chosen to serve as acting CDC director, several White House officials confirmed to CBS News and KFF Health News. And in an internal email sent to CDC staffers that evening, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. confirmed O’Neill as the acting CDC director without addressing Monarez’s departure.
“I am committed to working with you to restore trust, transparency, and credibility to the CDC,” Kennedy told CDC employees, later writing that “President Trump and I are aligned on the commonsense vision for the CDC: Strengthen the public health infrastructure by returning to its core mission of protecting Americans from communicable diseases by investing in innovation to prevent, detect and respond to future threats.”
Houry and Daskalakis said they had become increasingly uneasy about how vaccine policy was being handled. Both pointed to preparations for the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices meeting, which recommends vaccine schedules.
Houry said they feared “some decisions had been made before there was even the data or the science to support those. We are scientists, and that was concerning to us.”
Daskalakis added that he was “very concerned that there’s going to be an attempt to relitigate vaccines that have already had clear recommendations with science that has been vetted,” which he warned could undermine public trust. “If you can’t attack access, then why not attack trust? And that’s what I think the playbook is,” he said.
Both officials cited instances in which evidence reviews were altered or withdrawn. A CDC analysis of thimerosal, a vaccine preservative, was briefly posted before being taken down at the HHS’ direction. “If there’s something that doesn’t line up with the recommendations, then that information will be taken down, and it’s not there for the public to see for openness and transparency,” Houry said.
The two also criticized what they described as a lack of direct communication between CDC scientists and HHS leadership. Daskalakis said his team was never invited to brief Kennedy on topics ranging from measles to COVID-19.
When asked about Kennedy’s calls for “radical transparency,” Houry and Daskalakis described learning about changes to the COVID vaccine schedule for children not through internal channels but via social media.
“The radical transparency manifested itself by a Twitter post, which is how Dr. Houry and I learned that the secretary had mandated the change in the children’s vaccine schedule for COVID,” Daskalakis recalled. “What is the background that led to that decision? And we were denied access to that information. So, I don’t think that that’s radically transparent,” Daskalakis said.
CBS News and KFF Health News reached out to HHS for comment on some of the allegations made by Houry and Daskalakis but did not immediately hear back.
Both officials said they had no jobs lined up when they resigned. Houry described the decision as an effort to raise the alarm about the direction of the agency.
“For us, this was really sending out a bat signal,” Houry said. “We were the very senior scientists and career leaders at CDC. We thought this was the time to stand together and try to do what we could to raise the alarm around public health in our country.”
Daskalakis said remaining at the CDC under current conditions would have made them complicit in what he called the “weaponization” of public health.
“The safety has already been compromised. … We are flying blind in the U.S. already. If we continued … we would be complicit and would be facilitating the ability to go from flying blind to actively harming people,” he said.
Houry emphasized the severity of the moment by noting that she left without a backup plan.
“My leaving without a job was really just showing how dire the circumstances had become,” Houry said.
Daskalakis said his decision was also shaped by his medical oath.
“As a physician, I take the Hippocratic oath: First, do no harm. I am seeing ideology permeating science in a way that is going to harm children and adults. … I think we are seeing things that are happening that are making our country less prepared to be able to respond to the everyday pathogens … but also … to the next big thing.”
Both also expressed concerns about their personal safety in the current climate.
“The environment we live in … stoked by misinformation, especially from people considered by some to be health authorities, makes me worried for all of us in public health,” Daskalakis said. “I am concerned, but that’s part of our job … to be brave and continue to speak the truth even when we are outside of the CDC.”
The resignations came weeks after a shooting outside the CDC’s Atlanta headquarters, which law enforcement linked to COVID misinformation.
Houry said the White House response to the shooting was muted. Kennedy toured the site but later gave an interview expressing distrust of experts. “That was after the attack. It was based on COVID misinformation. So this is when we were trying to build trust,” she said.
Daskalakis added that while Kennedy later described mass shootings as a public health crisis, he believed the secretary should address misinformation as a root cause. “The misinformation about the COVID vaccine — that has been documented by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation” as the reason for the CDC shooting. “I would really recommend that the secretary actually do take his own advice and actually address the core problem that led to that shooting as well,” he said.
He also noted that the CDC’s gun violence prevention programs had been sharply reduced. “We talk about violence as a public health problem. It is, and there’s things we can do to prevent it. Unfortunately, the majority of that program, the staff are terminated,” he said.
The firings and resignations have sparked calls for oversight. Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont called for a bipartisan investigation, Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington urged Kennedy’s removal, and Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana — who voted to confirm Kennedy’s appointment as HHS secretary — said the developments would “require oversight.”
The events come as the FDA narrowed eligibility for updated COVID vaccines to older adults and people with risk factors for severe COVID.
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This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
