‘People will die because of this’: How RFK Jr. drove out the CDC’s senior leaders

On Wednesday, the nation’s premier health agency lost some of its most senior and respected leaders, in the ham-fisted way we’ve come to expect from the Trump administration.

Susan Monarez, director of the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention for just shy of a month, was reportedly called in to meet with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Monday and pledge her support for pulling back approvals for Covid vaccines. When she declined, reportedly saying that she needed to confer with her senior staff, Kennedy ordered her to fire her senior staff and when she refused that and enlisted the help of Bill Cassidy, the Republican chair of the Senate health committee, Kennedy asked for her resignation.

By Wednesday afternoon, the HHS’ official X account was saying she was out, and a lawyer hired by Monarez was saying no, she had not and would not resign. A White House spokesman weighed in that evening saying yes, actually, she was fired, but early Thursday, Monarez’s lawyers said that the “legally deficient” firing had not come from the president himself and so she was still CDC director. And the Senate health committee is looking into it, Cassidy posted.

The typical bungling around Monarez’s firing from Kennedy overshadows a bigger bombshell that ripped through the agency Wednesday. In what appears to be a coordinated action, four of the agency’s top leaders quit.

Dr. Deb Houry, deputy director and chief medical officer, Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, Dr. Jen Layden, director of the Office of Public Health Data, Surveillance and Technology, and Dr. Daniel Jernigan, director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, resigned within minutes of each other Wednesday, leaving usually staid scientists and staff bereft and, as five current and former CDC officials told me, without a bulwark for the worst of Kennedy’s anti-vaccine agenda going forward.

“They were the last stalwarts,” a recently departed official who had worked with the resigned leaders said, likening it to the public health version of Richard Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre.” “No one else has the public health chops to lead the agency.”

“People will die because of this,” said a current senior official who worked under one of the directors who resigned. “We won’t be able to get out guidance or get out funding for public health departments or get out vaccines. We’re going to be sicker as a country, not as effective, waste resources. And for what? I don’t understand.”

Houry, Daskalakis, and Jernigan were escorted off CDC’s Atlanta campus by security on Thursday morning, according to a senior agency official. Current employees were planning a public show of support outside CDC’s Atlanta offices later Thursday afternoon.

The officials, who asked not to be named over fears of retribution from Kennedy, describe Houry, Jernigan and Daskalakis as brilliant physicians and effective managers who led the country through decades of public health crises from Ebola to mpox to Covid. Their letters of resignation were shared with MSNBC by officials who had received them.

“Since 1994, I have worked at CDC with some of the most intelligent, driven, and compassionate people, working to detect, control, and prevent infectious diseases,” wrote Jernigan, a widely respected epidemiologist who had spent three decades investigating nearly every kind of outbreak from inside the agency. “Given the current context in the Department, I feel it is best for me to offer my resignation.”

Before Monarez’s Senate confirmation, chief medical officer Houry had been the CDC’s de facto leader, the officials said. With Houry gone, one senior scientist said, “there’s no one up at the office of the director that actually knows how public health works.”

“For the good of the nation and the world, the science at CDC should never be censored or subject to political pauses or interpretations,” Houry wrote, adding that the recent “overstatement of risks and the rise of misinformation” around vaccines “have cost lives, as demonstrated by the highest number of U.S. measles cases in 30 years and the violent attack on our agency.”

“I love this agency,” wrote Houry, a public health official in the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations. “I am committed to protecting the public’s health, but the ongoing changes prevent me from continuing in my job as a leader of the agency.”

Daskalakis, resigning as the head of the center focused on vaccines and respiratory diseases, was unsparing. “Enough is enough,” he wrote.

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Daskalakis, a physician and public health official who had overseen some of the CDC response to this year’s deadly measles outbreak — which Kennedy has downplayed — cited recent changes to immunization schedules as a threat to the lives of children and pregnant people, and said that the analysis used to make those decisions were either absent or false.

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“I have never experienced such radical non-transparency, nor have I seen such unskilled manipulation of data to achieve a political end rather than the good of the American people,” Daskalakis, who is known at CDC as Dr. Demetre, wrote in an email sent to colleagues and later posted on X.

Daskalakis went on to say that Kennedy should not be considered a source of accurate information, that he had never taken a briefing by a CDC subject matter expert from his center and that, instead, he was advised by “unvetted and conflicted outside organizations.”

“I am not sure who the Secretary is listening to, but it is quite certainly not to us,” Daskalakis wrote. “The intentional eroding of trust in low-risk vaccines favoring natural infection and unproven remedies will bring us to a pre-vaccine era where only the strong will survive and many if not all will suffer.”

Daskalakis invoked last month’s shooting at CDC Atlanta headquarters that killed a police officer and sprayed hundreds of bullets into employee windows — an attack that law enforcement agencies say was motivated by anti-vaccine beliefs. “The recent shooting at CDC is not why I am resigning. My grandfather, who I am named after, stood up to fascist forces in Greece and lost his life doing so. I am resigning to make him and his legacy proud,” he wrote, “I am resigning because of the cowardice of a leader that cannot admit that HIS and his minions’ words over decades created an environment where violence like this can occur.”

The resignations of some of the most beloved and longest-serving leaders within CDC came as a shock inside the agency but not a surprise.

Save for his confirmation hearing and private promises to Cassidy, Kennedy has clearly communicated his intentions to dismantle the CDC. Over decades of activism and lawyering, Kennedy has cast the CDC as the villain in his vaccine conspiracy theories, calling the agency a “cesspool of corruption,” filled with doctors and scientists who seek to profit off of injured children.

In just seven months, Kennedy has: pushed sweeping budget cuts and canceled billions in research and development; overseen mass layoffs and reorganizations that erased whole teams tackling clear health threats; without justification, withdrawn Covid vaccine recommendations for healthy children and pregnant people; gutted the agency’s vaccine advisory panel, firing respected experts and replacing them with ideological loyalists; installed a vocal Covid vaccine critic to chair a safety subcommittee; reopened the long-debunked vaccines-and-autism debate, promising a cause by September; hired a discredited anti-vaccine researcher who experimented on autistic children to trawl government data and relitigate settled science; pressed for access to private data to fuel his project; undermined his own epidemiologists during the Texas measles response; downplayed a shooting that left CDC staff shaken; announced sweeping policy changes on social media with no data to back them and accused the American Academy of Pediatrics of a “pay-to-play scheme” for daring to dissent. He’s done it all mostly from the road, on a national MAHA tour, where between performative push-ups and pull-ups, he’s cheered GOP states as they have restricted food benefits for low-income families.

But for all Kennedy’s noise, Wednesday’s loss of the CDC’s backbone, its quietest and most competent public health leaders, may prove to be his most consequential move yet.

After a long pause and a heavy sigh, one official told me Wednesday, “There’s no one left.”

The officials, who asked not to be named over fears of retribution from Kennedy, describe Houry, Jernigan and Daskalakis as brilliant physicians and effective managers who led the country through decades of public health crises from Ebola to mpox to Covid. Their letters of resignation were shared with MSNBC by officials who had received them.