A top deputy of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy will take over as the acting head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after its former chief was ousted over a vaccine policy disagreement.
Jim O’Neill, who currently serves as the deputy secretary at the DHHS, will now serve as the interim head of the CDC, according to The Washington Post.
Kennedy has frequently questioned the efficacy of certain vaccines and has previously played into unfounded conspiracy theories, such as linking vaccines to autism.
According to an anonymous source who spoke with the Post, O’Neill will continue to work directly for Kennedy in his deputy secretary role while also leading at the CDC, at least until a permanent head is selected.
Susan Monarez, the previous CDC chief, was fired by the Trump administration after she rejected Kennedy’s requests to overhaul the CDC’s federal vaccine policy.
Kennedy accused Monarez of trying to obstruct President Donald Trump’s health agenda, according to the sources.
Monarez’s lawyers released a statement on Wednesday night saying that she “refused to rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives.”
After she was fired, other senior CDC staff resigned in solidarity with the agency head.
Dr Ashish Jha, the dean of Brown University School of Public Health and a former White House Covid-19 response coordinator, wrote in a STAT editorial that the CDC’s “chief medical officer, multiple center directors, and its top data scientist” have all left the agency, and that what remains “is a skeletal crew, leaderless,” and without a plan for the next major crisis.
“The collapse of this unseen shield affects all of us in ways we don’t always appreciate. It shapes whether your child’s school stays open during a flu surge. Whether a restaurant is shut down before contaminated food sickens dozens more,” he wrote. “Whether programs that prevent youth suicide continue to run. When public health protections fail, we all feel it.”
O’Neill — a former staffer during the George W Bush administration and a friend of right-wing billionaire and Trump ally Peter Thiel — is expected to take the reigns on Kennedy’s vaccine policy overhaul.
Neither Monarez or O’Neill are former physicians. He is a tech investor and entrepreneur and was a vaccine skeptic during the coronavirus pandemic. He once argued on social media that the “CDC can redefine the word vaccine at will.”
Democrats and some health experts have expressed alarm at the firing of Monarez and the subsequent departure of the CDC’s top experts.
“I think this is quite a negative and potentially catastrophic step for the country,” Admiral Brett Giroir, a doctor who helped lead the pandemic response during the Trump administration, told The New York Times.
He said he didn’t “know who’s in charge,” adding that it is “frightening because the No. 1 thing you need is somebody in charge.”
Senator Bernie Sanders has called for an investigation into Monarez’s firing.
“RFK Jr. is pushing out scientific leaders who refuse to act as a rubber stamp for his dangerous conspiracy theories and manipulate science,” he wrote on X. “Today, I am calling for a bipartisan congressional investigation into the firing of CDC Director Dr. Monarez.”
Senator Patty Murray on Thursday called Kennedy a “lunatic who does not belong in government, much less as our nation’s top health official” and called for his firing.
“It is dangerous to allow him to oversee ALL federal health research and public health infrastructure. It is never too late to do the right thing. Fire RFK Jr,” she wrote on X.
Senator Jon Ossoff said in a statement on Thursday that Kennedy helming the nation’s federal health agencies was a “grave error.”
“Yesterday’s events are yet more evidence that putting a quack like Bobby Kennedy in charge of public health was a grave error,” the Georgia Democrat wrote. “The Trump Administration has been engaged for months in a campaign to destroy the CDC, America’s preeminent disease-fighting agency.”
Even some Republicans have stepped out to criticize Trump and Kennedy’s decision. Senator Bill Cassidy, who heads the Senate’s health panel and who was the deciding vote to confirm Kennedy as the head of HHS, called for more control over the CDC departures. He advised the Trump administration to reject any future vaccine recommendations if they’re formed by advisory panels whose members are hand-picked by Kennedy, according to Politico.
Senator Susan Collins, also a Republican, similarly said the firing and mass departure of top CDC officials was alarming, and she echoed Cassidy’s calls for congressional oversight at the agency.
The criticism did little to stir Trump. An anonymous White House official told Politico that it was “fair to say the president trusts Secretary Kennedy.”
Trump even praised Kennedy during a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday while the two were spinning dark tales about the “horror show” that is autism. Kennedy has reportedly been adamant about finding the cause of the condition.
Monarez’s firing may not be the last of the major changes coming to the CDC. During a press conference on Thursday alongside Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Kennedy warned that there’s a “lot of trouble” at the CDC and warned that more firings may be on the way.
“There’s a lot of trouble at CDC,” he said. “And it’s going to require getting rid of some people over the long term in order for us to change the institutional culture and bring back pride and self-esteem and make that agency the stellar agency that it’s always been.”
