The administration of United States President Donald Trump is expected to install Jim O’Neill as acting head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), replacing a director who clashed with the White House over policies that defy scientific evidence.
News outlets, including The Washington Post and The Associated Press, reported O’Neill’s selection after Trump officials said they removed CDC Director Susan Monarez.
O’Neill is currently deputy to Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Sources close to Monarez have told news agencies that she butted heads with Kennedy over questions of misinformation and vaccine policy.
“She said that there were two things she would never do in the job. One was anything that was deemed illegal, and the second was anything that she felt flew in the face of science, and she said she was asked to do both of those,” Richard Besser, former acting director of the CDC, told reporters.
Several high-level CDC officials resigned from their positions in solidarity with Monarez and in defiance of what they depicted as the undermining of scientific expertise as a basis of public health policy.
Monarez said that she refused to “rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives and fire dedicated health experts”. She had been in her job for less than a month.
Kennedy, a prominent anti-vaccination activist before joining the Trump administration, has moved to reshape the agency and expel advisers who do not align with his views.
He purged a vaccine advisory board of its members in June, moving to replace them with individuals who share views closer to his own.
Speaking on the TV programme Fox and Friends on Thursday, Kennedy portrayed the CDC as an institute in dire need of reform.
“The CDC has problems,” Kennedy said, accusing the centres of spreading COVID-19 “misinformation” after it advised mask wearing and social distancing.
While he did not mention Monarez by name, he argued the CDC’s culture was due for a change.
“ I cannot comment on personnel issues, but 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 any more,” he said.
“We need strong leadership that will go in there and that will be able to execute on President Trump’s broad ambitions.”
At Thursday’s White House news briefing, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt echoed the sentiment that the CDC director had to be loyal to Trump’s agenda.
“Her lawyer’s statement made it abundantly clear themselves that she was not aligned with the president’s mission to make America healthy again,” Leavitt said.
She also offered a White House account of how Monarez was allegedly fired.
“The secretary [Kennedy] asked her to resign. She said she would, and then she said she wouldn’t. So the president fired her, which he has every right to do,” Leavitt said. “It was President Trump who was overwhelmingly re-elected on November 5th. This woman has never received a vote in her life.”
But scientists and doctors who worked closely with Monarez said recent changes at the CDC undermined the agency’s mission to protect the public from health threats.
One top CDC leader who resigned this week, Demetre Daskalakis, warned that the agency’s new direction under Trump portended real risks to public health.
“I’m a doctor. I took the Hippocratic oath that said, ‘First, do no harm.’ I believe harm is going to happen, and so I can’t be a part of it,” said Daskalakis, the former director for the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.
Tensions had been especially high within the agency over the last several weeks, after a gunman who blamed COVID-19 vaccines for his health issues attacked the CDC headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia.
That shooting left one police officer dead, and the suspect took his own life.
Kennedy himself has baselessly called the COVID-19 vaccine the “deadliest vaccine ever made”.
After the shooting, representatives for the CDC’s workers denounced Kennedy for contributing to public distrust of the health agency.
“This tragedy was not random, and it compounds months of mistreatment, neglect, and vilification that CDC staff have endured,” a union representing CDC employees, AFGE Local 2883, said in a statement.
Meanwhile, the group Fired But Fighting, composed of laid-off employees, condemned Kennedy for “his continuous lies about science and vaccine safety, which have fueled a climate of hostility and mistrust”.
As the CDC continues to winnow down its workforce, employees also issued an open letter to Kennedy, accusing him of “terminating critical CDC workers in a destroy-first-and-ask-questions-later manner”.
