The ousting of the director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has tightened Robert F Kennedy Jr’s grip on the vital public health institution as he pushes his sceptical views on vaccines.
On Thursday, President Donald Trump picked the heath department’s deputy secretary Jim O’Neill as acting CDC director, according to people familiar with the matter, after a rapid leadership clearout at the agency.
On Wednesday, the White House moved to fire Susan Monarez, after she refused Kennedy’s call to resign, and three top officials quit. Monarez has vowed to contest the decision.
The departures come as Kennedy tries to bring the CDC in line with his own scepticism of vaccines, after the health secretary previously fired all of the members of a top vaccine advisory committee organised by the agency.
“The firing and the subsequent resignations are part of a concerted campaign to disassemble the national immunisation enterprise,” Paul Kim, a partner at Kendall Square Policy Strategies, a consultancy. The opportunity to name a new director would increase Kennedy’s control, Kim added.
O’Neill previously worked as a managing director at Peter Thiel’s hedge fund, Clarium Capital, and was chief executive of the Thiel Foundation. The Washington Post previously reported O’Neill’s new role.
The upheaval at the CDC opens a new front in the Trump administration’s push to assert control over crucial federal agencies, after clashing with the Federal Reserve and firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Kennedy, speaking on Fox Thursday morning, distanced himself from the firing. “It would be inappropriate for me to comment on a personnel issue.”
“The CDC has problems. We saw the misinformation coming out of COVID . . . There is really a deeply, deeply embedded, I would say, malaise at the agency,” he said.
At his confirmation hearing in January, Kennedy sought to reassure Senators about his views on vaccines and that he would not radically disrupt US public health policy.
This week’s turmoil at the CDC, which has a $14.5bn budget and responds to issues ranging from disease outbreaks to poisonings, shows how tension around Kennedy’s agenda have rapidly escalated into a public clash.
Earlier this month, he cancelled $500mn of funding for mRNA research. It is used in certain vaccines, including Moderna’s Covid-19 shot. Shares of Moderna dipped 2.5 per cent on Thursday.
The announcement of Monarez’s firing came hours after the Food and Drug Administration narrowed its authorisation for the latest Covid-19 shots made by Moderna and others.
“This season’s FDA approvals essentially remove healthy children and younger adults from the vaccine indications,” Morningstar analysts said.
Ron Wyden, a Democratic senator from Oregon, wrote to Kennedy on Thursday demanding more details about his actions and accusing the health secretary of sowing “widespread confusion and misinformation across the nation”.
The three officials who quit include the CDC’s chief medical officer Debra Houry, top infectious disease official Daniel Jernigan and Demetre Daskalakis, the head of its immunisation division.
Daskalakis warned that the CDC had become “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”.
The move against Monarez comes as Trump leads an assault on the US central bank to lower interest rates. This week he took the unprecedented step of attempting to fire a Fed governor, Lisa Cook.
Earlier this month, he sacked the head of the BLS after a gloomy jobs report, nominating a loyalist to replace her.
The attacks have prompted fears of a partisan clearout of officials who are seen to impede the administration’s priorities — and in the case of the CDC, Kennedy’s anti-vaccine stance — and an erosion of expertise that risks leading to serious harm in the future.
“It will be an extremely frightening world if the CDC is hollowed out and its ranks filled only by conspiracy theorists that RFK Jr agrees with,” said Patty Murray, the most senior Democrat on the Senate committee on health, education, labour and pensions.
Murray called for Kennedy to be fired. The American Public Health Association, which represents doctors and other health officials, also called for him to be removed.
“Since taking office, his actions have sown confusion, demoralised staff and jeopardised the very foundation of our nation’s health security,” the APHA said.
Republican senator Bill Cassidy, chair of the health committee, opened the door to congressional scrutiny.
“These high-profile departures will require oversight by the HELP Committee,” Cassidy, who reluctantly supported Kennedy’s nomination, wrote on X.
The senate confirmed Monarez on July 29, and she won praise from Cassidy as well as Kennedy when she was sworn in as CDC director.
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