Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr is facing calls to step down from over 1,000 current former staff from his department, who accuse him of “compromising the health of the nation.”
The demand comes after Susan Monarez resigned as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last week, less than a month into her tenure, following a clash with the secretary over vaccine policy, prompting four other officials to follow her through the door in a show of solidarity.
In an open letter from the campaign group Save HHS, the signatories say of Kennedy: “Should he decline to resign, we call upon the president and U.S. Congress to appoint a new secretary of health and human services, one whose qualifications and experience ensure that health policy is informed by independent and unbiased peer-reviewed science. We expect those in leadership to act when the health of Americans is at stake.”
A previous letter from Save HHS dated August 20 called on the secretary to do more to protect public health officials in the wake of a shooting near the CDC’s campus in Atlanta, Georgia, on August 8, which saw a man fire hundreds of rounds of ammunition and kill a police officer after expressing anger about Covid-19 vaccines. The gunman also died in the incident.
That appeal has since attracted a further 887 signatures, according to The Hill, The department responded by accusing the group of politicizing the tragedy.
Its latest letter cites the ousting of Monarez as evidence of what it considers to be the state of chaos surrounding Kennedy’s reign at the helm of public health administration and attacks him from appointing “political ideologues who pose as scientific experts and manipulate data to fit predetermined conclusions.”
The signatories continued: “We believe health policy should be based in strong, evidence-based principles rather than partisan politics. But under Secretary Kennedy’s leadership, HHS policies are placing the health of all Americans at risk, regardless of their politics.”
The staffers stress that they have put their names to the letter in their personal rather than professional capacities. Some preferred to remain anonymous “out of well-founded fear of retaliation and threats to personal safety.”
HHS Communications Director Andrew Nixon dismissed their concerns in a statement that argued Kennedy has been working tirelessly on behalf of the CDC since taking office.
“Secretary Kennedy has been clear: the CDC has been broken for a long time,” Nixon said. “Restoring it as the world’s most trusted guardian of public health will take sustained reform and more personnel changes. From his first day in office, he pledged to check his assumptions at the door – and he asked every HHS colleague to do the same.
“That commitment to evidence-based science is why, in just seven months, he and the HHS team have accomplished more than any health secretary in history in the fight to end the chronic disease epidemic and Make America Healthy Again.”
Monarez’s exit has not been the only high-profile departure from Kennedy’s team this summer. Dr Vinay Prasad was forced out as the top vaccine official at the Food and Drug Administration on July 29, only to be reinstated on August 9.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Prasad’s exit came about at the insistence of the White House and was influenced, at least in part, by a pressure campaign from by far-right activist Laura Loomer, who was opposed to his progressive background and past support for Vermont Democratic Sen. Bernie Sanders.
The WSJ also revealed that the secretary’s move to fire his then-chief of staff Heather Flick Melanson and her deputy Hannah Anderson in July caused such upset that the latter accidentally backed her car into Kennedy’s when leaving a staff car park.
RFK Jr’s “Make America Healthy Again” movement has been characterised as a fractious coalition of vaccine skeptics – or “medical freedom” activists – healthy eating advocates, and critics of “pesticides, microplastics and corporate power.”
It consists of many Kennedy supporters who backed him long before he rose to power as an associate of President Donald Trump, many of whom have differing views or were attracted by different aspects of his messaging and all of whom expect results now that he is in a position of real authority.
