Hello,

You’ve probably heard about health secretary Robert F. Kennedy firing Susan Monarez, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the subsequent resignation of at least four top CDC experts.

These high-profile losses made the morning news, but they were far from the agency’s first departures this year. The CDC contains several centers and offices, and most of them have been rendered leaderless since Kennedy took the helm of the Department of Health and Human Services, public health specialist David Fleming told me. Fleming chairs a congressionally established advisory committee to the director of the CDC.

The director of the CDC’s chronic diseases center is gone. So are the heads of the centers on HIV, viral hepatitis, and tuberculosis; on birth defects and disabilities; on public health infrastructure; and on occupational health and safety. So are the directors of the CDC’s office of science, office of health equity, and the office handling Freedom of Information requests. These leaders have been laid off by HHS or pressured to leave. 

Amid an outbreak of measles, HHS fired CDC scientists who specialize in respiratory diseases and infectious diseases. In June, Kennedy fired all the scientists who advise the CDC on vaccines and replaced them with researchers who lack relevant credentials and have spread misinformation. And even after the Covid pandemic exposed the critical need for data modernization at the CDC, the agency’s information center is now gutted, and funds for disease surveillance are cut.  

“CDC offices already have been closed and work has already ceased,” warned Fleming and other members of the advisory committee in a letter to Congress, obtained by KFF Health News. “Resources already appropriated by you for FY25 are not reaching states and localities, resulting in significant and ongoing disruption” of programs, it added.

Such realities fly in the face of a new editorial from Kennedy, which explains the changes by arguing that the agency was overly bureaucratic, politicized, and “corroded” by “mission creep.” 

Kennedy lists priorities for the CDC moving forward: strengthening infrastructure to detect and respond to outbreaks; modernizing data systems; investing in the public health workforce; applying gold-standard science to vaccine recommendations; and empowering state and local health departments.

Each of these stated priorities is contradicted by the drastic measures above, and cuts to public health funding more broadly. 

“Under Secretary Kennedy’s leadership, HHS policies are placing the health of all Americans at risk,” said a Wednesday letter signed by about 1,000 current and former staff at the CDC and other HHS agencies, calling for Kennedy’s resignation. 

“The nation’s health security is at risk and is in the hands of people focusing on ideological self-interest,” wrote Demetre Daskalakis, the director of immunization and respiratory diseases at the CDC, in his resignation letter last week. He backed up the allegation with examples. For instance, he said Kennedy has ignored CDC scientists offering to present him data addressing questions on vaccine safety. 

“I must also cite the recklessness of the administration in their efforts to erase transgender populations, cease critical domestic and international HIV programming, and terminate key research to support equity as part of my decision,” he wrote. “Public health is not merely about the health of the individual, but it is about the health of the community, the nation, the world.”

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