An attempt by Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr to oust Susan Monarez as director of the CDC has run into a snag – she is refusing to step down.
The official HHS account on social media platform X announced in a post that Monarez was “no longer director” of the CDC, just a month after she was appointed to the role, with rumours suggesting she was under pressure to resign because she would not support the controversial COVID-19 vaccination policies being pursued by the department under Kennedy.
A statement from lawyers representing Monarez said that she has “neither resigned nor received notification from the White House that she has been fired, and as a person of integrity and devoted to science, she will not resign.”
The attorneys – Mark Zaid and Abbe Lowell – added that Monarez was being targeted because she was refusing to rubber-stamp directives from the administration and is being punished for “protecting the public over serving a political agenda.”
A report in the Washington Post suggests that Monarez had resisted Kennedy’s COVID-19 policy changes and sought support in her position from Republican Senator Bill Cassidy, who had polio as a child and is a staunch supporter of vaccines. He delivered the deciding vote in Kennedy’s appointment to the HHS role earlier this year after receiving assurances that access to immunisation programmes would not be restricted.
Soon after Monarez’s lawyers issued the statement, the Trump administration formally fired her, prompting the resignation of other senior CDC officials, including chief medical officer Debra Houry, head of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, Demetre Daskalakis, and Daniel Jernigan, who led the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases.
Cassidy has since posted on X that “these high-profile departures will require oversight by the HELP Committee”, which he chairs.
Daskalakis posted his resignation letter on social media, saying the views of Kennedy and his staff “challenge my ability to continue in my current role at the agency and in the service of the health of the American people.”
He continued: “Having worked in local and national public health for years, I have never experienced such radical non-transparency, nor have I seen such unskilled manipulation of data to achieve a political end.”
Houry, meanwhile, wrote in her resignation notice that “for the good of the nation and the world, the science at CDC should never be censored or subject to political pauses or interpretations.”
Among other moves by the HHS Secretary since taking office cited in the lawsuit are the wholesale firing of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunisation Practices (ACIP) and the ‘stacking’ of the panel with members who are more closely aligned with Kennedy’s thinking on vaccines, cuts to funding for immunisation programmes, and the launch of an inquiry into the debunked idea that vaccines can cause autism – headed by a vaccines sceptic who was disciplined for practicing medicine without a license.
