The Trump administration said Thursday the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) needs to align with the president’s “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) agenda, after the removal of its director and exodus of four other senior leaders.
In an interview on Fox News’s “Fox & Friends,” Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. criticized the CDC for touting water fluoridation, vaccines and abortion as pillars of public health.
“We need to look at the priorities of the agency,” Kennedy said in the interview, “if there’s really a deeply, deeply embedded, I would say, malaise at the agency, and we need strong leadership that will go in there and that will be able to execute on President Trump’s broad ambitions.”
“The agency is in trouble, and we need to fix it — and we are fixing it,” Kennedy added. “And it may be that some people should not be working there anymore.”
Kennedy has sought to throttle access to COVID-19 vaccines in recent months, while overhauling the panel that has long advised the CDC on vaccine approvals. He has worked to shift the focus of public health agencies to environmental toxins that he blames for causing obesity, autism and mental health issues.
The New York Times reported Wednesday that Kennedy told Monarez to resign or be fired on Monday over tensions around vaccine policy. Lawyers for Monarez have said she refused to resign and could be fired only by Trump because she was a Senate-confirmed presidential appointee.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Thursday told reporters Trump fired Monarez and plans to appoint her replacement soon. She said officials who refused to align with Trump’s MAHA agenda would face a similar fate.
“Her lawyer’s statement made it abundantly clear … that she was not aligned with the president’s mission to make America healthy again,” Leavitt said at a press briefing.
“If people are not aligned with the president or secretary’s vision to make America healthy again, then we will show them the door.”
Four top CDC officials announced their resignations Wednesday evening shortly after Monarez was fired, including Deb Houry, the chief medical officer.
Kennedy said in the interview it would be “inappropriate” to comment on personnel issues, but he was not surprised the four CDC officials resigned.
Demetre Daskalakis, head of the agency’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, was among the officials who resigned. He posted his resignation letter on social media, citing differences with Kennedy that “challenge my ability to continue in my current role at the agency and in the service of the health of the American people.”
“I am unable to serve in an environment that treats CDC as a tool to generate policies and materials that do not reflect scientific reality and are designed to hurt rather than to improve the public’s health,” he wrote in his resignation letter.
“I am not sure who the Secretary is listening to, but it is quite certainly not to us,” he added. “Unvetted and conflicted outside organizations seem to be the sources HHS use over the gold standard science of CDC and other reputable sources.”
