Susan Monarez was fired by President Donald Trump.
Several top officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) stepped down following the ouster of Susan Monarez as the public health agency’s director.
Among those leaving the agency was Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.
“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,” Daskalakis said in a letter posted on X on Aug. 27, shortly after the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said Monarez was no longer director of the CDC.
Daskalakis said the move was motivated in part by the removal of COVID-19 vaccines from immunization schedules for healthy children and pregnant women. He also said that as far as he is aware, no CDC experts have briefed Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. since Kennedy took office in February.
“I am not sure who the Secretary is listening to, but it is quite certainly not to us,” he wrote.
Dr. Daniel Jernigan, director of the CDC’s National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, has also resigned.
“Over the last few months, it really has been a different approach to things,” he said. “We were asked to host a number of individuals that were brought in specifically to review and revise scientific information we had thought was settled—information about vaccines and vaccine safety.”
Jernigan also said, “I have come to that point where I’m not able to fulfill the duties that I have as a public health professional in this environment.”
Also exiting is Debra Houry, the CDC’s chief medical officer, who said that Monarez’s attempts to be transparent, including posting documents for public comment, had been blocked.
“She was given feedback from HHS that those couldn’t happen, and she was called to a meeting with the secretary on Monday,” Houry said. “For us, we knew that if our scientific leader couldn’t make changes like that, we could no longer stay.”
HHS did not respond to a request for comment.
