A letter published on Wednesday from more than 1,000 past and present workers of the Department of Health and Human Services department (HHS) has demanded the resignation of Robert F Kennedy Jr, insisting the health secretary’s attacks on vaccines endangered the lives of all Americans.
The hard-hitting letter, addressed to Congress members, blames Kennedy for turmoil at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), including the firing of the agency’s chief and replacement by a Donald Trump loyalist with no medical or scientific background.
It comes two days after nine former CDC officials wrote in a New York Times guest essay that Kennedy’s leadership, and ousting of the CDC director, Susan Monarez, months after he appointed her, was “unacceptable” and “unlike anything we have ever seen”.
The letter posted on Wednesday by a group calling itself Save HHS assails Kennedy for “endangering the nation’s health by spreading inaccurate health information”.
It cites the resignations of other leading health officials, including Demetre Daskalakis, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases; Daniel Jernigan, the agency’s director for emerging and zoonotic infectious diseases; and Debra Houry, its chief medical officer.
It also offers sharp criticism of Kennedy’s installation of “political ideologues who pose as scientific experts” in leading roles, including on a key vaccine advisory panel. Several members have touted discredited theories, such as the long-disproven link between vaccines and autism.
Earlier this week, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) severely restricted who could get updated Covid-19 vaccines, with Kennedy posting to social media that coronavirus “mandates” from the Biden administration were rescinded and that vaccines would be available only to those at highest risk.
“Our oath requires us to speak out when the constitution is violated and the American people are put at risk,” the letter, co-signed by six partner organizations in the medical field, said.
“We warn the president, Congress and the public that Secretary Kennedy’s actions are compromising the health of this nation, and we demand Secretary Kennedy’s resignation.”
It calls for Trump to appoint a new health secretary “whose qualifications and experience ensure that health policy is informed by independent and unbiased peer-reviewed science”.
Trump this week expressed his displeasure at the chaos engulfing the CDC, acknowledging in a social media post that the agency was being “ripped apart” by the vaccines controversy. But he claimed drug manufacturers were to blame for allegedly not revealing publicly “the success or failure” of Covid vaccines.
The Trump administration also previously sided with Kennedy over Monarez’s firing, which prompted bipartisan pushback and a walkout of dozens of CDC staff last month. Monarez, a long-serving government expert on infectious diseases, was confirmed in July, but fired because she was “not aligned with the president’s agenda”, a White House statement said.
The 1,040 former and current HHS employees who signed Wednesday’s letter said they were writing again because Kennedy ignored their earlier communication. A statement issued by HHS accused the group of “an attempt to politicize a tragedy” by claiming Kennedy’s vaccine rhetoric played a role in an attack on the CDC headquarters in Atlanta on 8 August in which a police officer was killed.
In its new letter, the group said that the HHS workforce is non-partisan, “implementing science-based policies developed under both Republican and Democratic administrations”.
It said: “We believe health policy should be based on 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.”
In a statement, the HHS communications director, Andrew Nixon, said: “Secretary Kennedy has been clear: the CDC has been broken for a long time. 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.”
The HHS employees signed their letter “in our own personal capacities, on our personal time, and without the use of government equipment”. It said “countless others” across HHS shared their concerns but “chose not to sign out of well-founded fear of retaliation and threats to personal safety”.
Up to 30 workers at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) were placed on leave last week after they publicly signed a letter of dissent over Trump’s dismantling of the agency and fears it would lead to a disaster like Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
