WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Thursday said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention needs to deliver on President Donald Trump’s ambitions, a day after the White House fired the health agency’s director and several top officials resigned.
Three of the officials were escorted from the CDC’s Atlanta headquarters campus on Thursday morning, according to four sources familiar with the situation.
The White House late on Wednesday said CDC Director Susan Monarez was fired because she “refused to resign despite informing HHS (Health and Human Services) leadership of her intent to do so,” adding that she was not “aligned with the president’s agenda of Making America Healthy Again.”
Monarez attorneys Mark S. Zaid and Abbe David Lowell rejected the White House statement, saying the firing notification was legally deficient and that she remains CDC director. Earlier on Wednesday, they said she was targeted for refusing to support “unscientific, reckless directives.”
The top officials who resigned, including CDC Chief Medical Officer Debra Houry, cited a rise in health misinformation especially on vaccines, attacks on science, the weaponization of public health, and attempts to cut the agency’s budget in their resignation letters, reviewed by Reuters.
The leadership upheaval at the CDC comes as Kennedy has made sweeping changes to vaccine policies since taking office this year, including firing its expert vaccine advisory panel members and replacing them with fellow anti-vaccine activists and other hand-picked advisers.
Since taking office in January, Trump has wrested control over U.S. government agencies that for years had taken pride in their independence from presidential politics as they oversee such matters as elections, stock markets and labor unrest.
Kennedy declined to comment during an interview on Thursday on the specifics of the departure of Monarez and four other top CDC officials.
“The agency is in trouble, and we need to fix it and we are fixing it. And it may be that some people should not be working there anymore,” he told Fox News’ “Fox and Friends” program.
“We need strong leadership that will go in there, and that will be able to execute on President Trump’s broad ambitions for this agency,” he added.
In addition to its role in protecting the health of the U.S. population, the CDC is a global leader in detecting and responding to infectious disease outbreaks and played a significant role in eradicating smallpox, reducing the global incidence of polio, and controlling HIV/AIDS.
The agency has been heavily criticized in recent months for dropping its recommendation that pregnant women be vaccinated against COVID-19 and for narrowing its backing of the shots for children with health complications. On Wednesday, the FDA gave a narrowed approval to the updated COVID vaccines rolling out soon.
ONE OF SEVERAL FIRINGS
Monarez is one of at least three Senate-confirmed regulatory officials Trump has moved to fire in the last three days. The others are Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook and Surface Transportation Board member Robert Primus.
Members of Trump’s administration subscribe to a legal theory that the president enjoys complete authority over the executive branch, and his administration has tested such views by asserting control over agencies and making decisions to cut or withhold funding approved by Congress.
The conservative-dominated Supreme Court has, to some extent, approved of some of Trump’s assertions of executive authority.
U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Chairman Senator Bill Cassidy, a Republican who expressed wariness about Kennedy’s anti-vaccine views before backing him, said on Wednesday that “these high profile departures will require oversight” by his committee.
In addition to Houry, National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases Director Demetre Daskalakis and National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases Director Daniel Jernigan stepped down, according to resignation letters.
Jernigan’s departure comes days after the agency reported the first U.S. human case of screwworm linked to an ongoing outbreak in Central America.
Jen Layden, director of the CDC Office of Public Health Data, Surveillance and Technology, has also resigned, according to one source familiar with the move.
Monarez’s attorneys said she had been notified by a White House personnel office staff member that she had been fired but that as a presidential appointee confirmed by the U.S. Senate, “only the president himself can fire her.”
PLANNED AUTISM REPORT
During her confirmation hearing, Monarez said she has not seen evidence linking vaccines and autism, contrasting her views with those of Kennedy.
Since taking the job, he has made misleading and unscientific claims about vaccines including that the measles vaccine contains cells from aborted fetuses and the mumps vaccination does not work.
Kennedy has launched a department-wide effort to investigate the rise in autism rates among children in the U.S., which he has said, without any scientific evidence, is due to “environmental toxins.” He has said the agency will present some of its findings in September.
“We are now developing evidence, sufficient evidence to ask for regulatory action on some of those (causes), or at least recommendations,” he told Fox News on Thursday.
(Reporting by Susan Heavey, David Thomas and Trevor Hunnicutt in Washington; writing by Costas Pitas; Editing by Caroline Humer, Chizu Nomiyama, Nick Zieminski and Bill Berkrot)
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