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.
We’re going to be sicker as a country, not as effective, waste resources. And for what? I don’t understand.”
Senior public health official
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.
These high profile departures will require oversight by the HELP Committee. https://t.co/38xBrC7cC6
— U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy, M.D. (@SenBillCassidy) August 28, 2025
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.
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.”
Dr. Demetre Daskalakis
“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.
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.








