The current director of the CDC is challenging her dismissal, but that has not stopped the White House from appointing a replacement.
The Trump administration has turned to Jim O’Neill, who currently serves as the deputy to Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, to replace infectious disease expert Dr Susan Monarez, who has been fired but is refusing to step down. The move was first reported by the Washington Post.
O’Neill is a tech investor with no medical or scientific background, so his appointment to the top CDC role – even on an interim basis – will do little to alleviate concerns that political ideology is trumping healthcare expertise at the agency. In earlier roles, he worked at the HHS during the Bush administration and also worked for billionaire tech investor and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.
O’Neill was quizzed closely by lawmakers during Congressional hearings that preceded his appointment, where he expressed strong support for vaccination but adopted a similar stance to Kennedy in saying he was not in favour of government-mandated programmes, promoting suggestions he would not be a check on the HHS Secretary’s well-established vaccine scepticism.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, O’Neill was also a critic of the CDC and also voiced support for unproven remedies such as ivermectin.
Monarez’s dismissal was swiftly followed by three other resignations by senior CDC figures, with another – director of the Office of Public Health Data, Science, and Technology, Jennifer Layden – now joining them.
Republican Senator and HELP Committee chair Bill Cassidy, a supporter of vaccination whose vote helped secure both Kennedy and O’Neill’s new roles, has called for a scheduled meeting of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) next month to be “indefinitely postponed” due to the chaos at the agency.
“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 in a statement. He previously asserted that all the high-profile departures from the CDC would need to be considered by the HELP committee.
A spokesperson for President Trump said that “Susan Monarez is not aligned with the president’s agenda of Making America Healthy Again,” and because she “refused to resign despite informing HHS leadership of her intent to do so, the White House has terminated Monarez from her position.”
Monarez’s lawyers said that she was dismissed because she “refused to rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives, and fire dedicated health experts.”
