CDC director pushed out just weeks after being confirmed

Post Reply New Topic

Susan Monarez has been fired just shy of a month into her role as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“Susan Monarez is no longer director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,” a post on the Department of Health and Human Services X account said. “We thank her for her dedicated service to the American people.”

The Washington Post first reported on her ousting.

Monarez's departure comes at a tumultuous time for the agency.

On Aug. 8, a gunman shattered windows of six buildings of the CDC campus. A police officer died in the shooting. Several days after the shooting, Monarez sought to reassure staffers during a virtual meeting.

“We know that misinformation can be dangerous,” Monarez said during the meeting, according to a transcript obtained by NBC News. “Not only to health, but to those that trust us and those we want to trust. We need to rebuild the trust together.”

Last Friday, Monarez canceled a meeting with CDC staff that had been scheduled for Monday. The focus of the meeting was going to be safety concerns and security enhancements following the shooting.

Unfortunately, we need to postpone Monday’s event for an HHS meeting that I have been asked to attend in person in DC," Monarez wrote in an email to CDC staff seen by NBC News.

With her firing, the agency returns to the leaderless state it has been in for the majority of the new Trump administration. Trump’s original pick for CDC director, Dr. David Weldon, was pulled from consideration hours before his confirmation hearing in March. Weldon, a former congressman from Florida, had a history of questioning vaccine safety.

An escalating conflict over an influential vaccine committee was one of the final straws that led to the firing of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Susan Monarez and the exodus of other highly regarded top officials.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had repeatedly undermined the agency’s independent Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, firing the committee’s members and appointing new members, including vaccine skeptics.

Early Wednesday, Monarez suggested to Dr. Richard Besser that she was going to be forced to sign off on new vaccine recommendations.

“She said there were two things she would never do in the job,” said Besser, a former acting CDC director and the CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. “One, in terms of firing her leadership who are talented civil servants like herself, and the other was to rubber-stamp ACIP recommendations that flew in the face of science.”

Hours later, Monarez was out, according to a Health and Human Services post on X. Almost immediately, several top officials resigned in protest.

One of those officials, Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, who directed the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases — which oversees vaccines — wrote in his resignation letter that a particular document related to the vaccine committee “ignored all feedback from career staff at CDC.”

The document was guidance for a newly formed work group that will present Covid vaccine data and research at the upcoming ACIP meeting — scheduled for September 18 — and contained anti-vaccine talking points. The work group will be led by newly appointed ACIP member Retsef Levi, an MIT professor who has been vocally against the mRNA Covid vaccines.

Daskalakis said in an interview that the new group members “were told that they have the ability to, quote, ‘prevent CDC bias from entering the work group.’ That’s unheard of. I don’t know what CDC bias is, because that’s not what we do. Our science is unbiased.”

Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., the chair of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee who was a key vote in Kennedy’s confirmation, said in a statement Thursday that the upcoming ACIP meeting should be postponed and called for “significant oversight.”

“Serious allegations have been made about the meeting agenda, membership, and lack of scientific process being followed for the now announced September ACIP meeting,” Cassidy said.“These decisions directly impact children’s health and the meeting should not occur until significant oversight has been conducted. 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.”

In an interview near the agency’s headquarters in Atlanta on Thursday, Dr. Debra Houry, the CDC’s chief medical officer, who resigned on Wednesday, said, “We reached our tipping point.”

“America’s public health is significantly in danger,” Houry said.

On Thursday afternoon, the White House appointed HHS deputy Jim O’Neill as the new acting CDC director, according to an administration official. The appointment was first reported by The Washington Post.

Hundreds of former and current CDC staffers, other public health workers and private citizens gathered outside the agency’s Atlanta headquarters Thursday to show respect for the officials who resigned. In addition to Daskalakis and Houry, Dr. Daniel Jernigan, the director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, also resigned.

The three made their way through the crowd of people who showed up to hug, applaud and shake their hands. Each spoke to the crowd to express gratitude for their support.

“We are going to be your loudest advocates!” Daskalakis said.

Jernigan, who’d been at the CDC for three decades, said in an interview that he’d been concerned that the administration had questioned the science that had long helped the agency make decisions about treatments and vaccines. “All of those past findings were being called into question and being reanalyzed in ways that we could not understand".

When asked whether Monarez would pursue legal action against the Trump administration, Zaid said, “We’re contemplating every available action but currently our position is she has not been properly or lawfully fired.”