CDC’s Been Hurting a Long Time

The firing of the 17 sitting members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) by Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on June 9, 2025 initiated a firestorm of criticism about the new direction the CDC is taking. There has been an outsized reaction among members of Congress, the corporate media, and medical trade groups about whether the nation’s federal health agency should continue to be trusted to uphold the so-called “gold standard” for medical science, specifically vaccine science. Shortly after Kennedy informed the ACIP members that their terms of service had ended, he appointed new members without conflicts of interest with the pharmaceutical industry.^{1 2 3}

CDC Director Monarez Undermines Kennedy, Gets Herself Fired

That firestorm of criticism about Kennedy’s decisions to make substantial changes in vaccine regulation and policymaking at DHHS became more pronounced after a 30-year old man with physical and mental health problems went on a shooting rampage at CDC headquarters in Atlanta on Aug. 8, damaging several buildings and killing a police officer. In 2024 police body camera footage of police responding to a suicide threat, which was released on Sept. 3, 2025, the shooter can be seen telling police that he was “in a lot of physical pain” and that he and his Dad “have been severely ill ever since they took the COVID shots…”^{4 5}

The day after the shooting at the CDC, on Aug. 9, CDC director Susan Monarez published a letter sent to more than 10,000 CDC employees blaming the incident on “the dangers of [vaccine] misinformation and its promulgation” that has “now led to deadly consequences.”⁶ Dr. Monarez added:

I will work to restore trust in public health to those who have lost it- through science, evidence, and clarity of purpose. I will need your help. Public health should never be under attack. We know that misinformation can be dangerous.⁶

Two weeks later, on Aug. 27, Monarez was fired by the Trump administration reportedly over vaccine policymaking disagreements with Kennedy.^{7 8}

It’s likely that Monarez’s letter was not taken kindly by Kennedy and was seen as a deliberate attempt to undermine his vaccine efficacy and safety agenda, as well as his leadership of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS)—something akin to instigating a rebellion at CDC. So Monarez’s firing was not entirely unreasonable.

In protest to the firing, several top CDC officials resigned from their posts, citing concerns over the scientific independence of the agency. These included Debra Houry, MD, MPH, chief science and medical officer, Demetre Daskalakis, MD, MPH, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, and Daniel Jernigan, MD, MPH, director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases—each of them submitting formal letters of resignation citing their reasons for leaving.^{9 10}

“It Feels Like the CDC Is Over”

In a New York Times op-ed piece titled “Will the CDC Survive,” published on Sept. 1, nine former CDC directors and acting directors warning about changes Kennedy has made at the CDC. They wrote:

What Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has done to the CDC and to our nation’s public health system over the past several months—culminating in his decision to fire Dr. Susan Monarez as CDC director days ago—is unlike anything we have ever seen at the agency, and unlike anything our country has ever experienced.¹¹

They added:

[I]t’s clear that the agency is hurting badly. The loss of Dr. Monarez and other top leaders will make it far more difficult for CDC to do what it has done for about 80 years, to work around the clock to protect Americans from threats to their lives and health.¹¹

Predictably, the media followed up with a series of overly dramatic articles highlighting the situation at the CDC. The Atlantic came out with a piece titled “It Feels Like the CDC Is Over.” The New York Times published an article titled “The Public Health Disaster Everyone Saw Coming.” The Hill wrote, “CDC tumult plunges public health world into ‘uncharted waters’.” Ah, but this one takes the cake… ‘Total Implosion’: Experts Sound ‘Massive Alarm’ Amid ‘Wholesale Destruction’ of CDC” by David Badash in something called the New Civil Rights Movement.”^{12 13 14 15}

Public Trust in CDC Dropped During Agency’s Response to the COVID Pandemic

The sense you get from reading articles such as these and when listening to the pundits on television and the former high ranking CDC officials is that, almost overnight, the government agency has gone from the being the world’s premier medical science authority to one that has lost the public’s trust and is on the verge of collapse. That is a false narrative. The decline in the public’s trust in the CDC has been taking place for many years. It did not just suddenly coincide with the firing of the ACIP members or the firing of Monarez or even the arrival of Kennedy as Secretary of DHHS.

The mess at the CDC has been long in coming, and it has happened because of missteps by past leaders of the agency—precisely some of the ones who penned the op-ed in the Times. This view was recently highlighted by the director of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Marty Makary, MD, who stressed:

The CDC needs an extremely strong leader. It’s a broken agency. This is an agency that, with 20,000 employees, could not generate a website to track the COVID virus. It was eventually created by one Johns Hopkins grad student. He created a COVID website that the world used. And it’s not just one or two mishaps at the CDC. Culturally, operationally, scientifically… they’ve lost their mission. They propagate dogma. They pushed cloth masks on toddlers for three years. They insisted schools shut out children for nearly two years using a phony, pseudoscience document that the teachers’ union edited, and those edits appeared in the final document. They made up six feet. They pushed vaccine boosters in young healthy people. So the CDC needs a re-alignment.¹⁶

In 2020, ProPublica published an article titled “Inside the Fall of the CDC.” In 2021, NPR publicized a poll conducted by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health which found only 52 percent of Americans had a great deal of trust in the CDC. In 2022, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) published a Rand study titled “Decline in Trust in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention During the COVID-19 Pandemic.” In a study published in the journal Health Affairs in 2023, the researchers found that about one-quarter of those surveyed said they trusted the CDC’s health recommendations “not very much” or “not at all.”^{17 18 19 20}

^{In a poll published by KFF on May 6, 2025, before the 17 ACIP members were fired or Monarez was even confirmed as CDC director, the nonprofit that analyzes health policy found that only 42 percent of the people surveyed trusted the CDC and FDA to do their jobs.21}

The title of an article in The Progressive magazine in 2024 (during the Biden administration) asked the question, “Can We Trust the CDC Anymore?”. The subtitle read: The agency’s updated COVID-19 isolation guidelines seem influenced by politics rather than grounded in medical truths.²⁰ The author, Mike Erwin wrote:

Now, I don’t trust the CDC either. It’s not because they’re always telling me hard truths that I don’t want to hear. It’s because I no longer believe that they are always telling me the truth. It seems to me that lately, the CDC has been basing what it says about COVID-19 on politics rather than science.²²

So this idea about the CDC’s loss of scientific integrity by the CDC officials who resigned after Monarez’s firing isn’t a new revelation either. They were simply spouting what a large portion of the American people have been feeling, perhaps as far back as the ill-fated 1976 “swine flu” pandemic in which 43 million people in the United States were vaccinated, but the CDC campaign had to be stopped because of the estimated 25-32 deaths linked to the vaccine and the hundreds of others who were left suffering with Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS).^{23 22}

Comparing 25-32 deaths and several hundred cases of GBS caused by the 1976 swine flu vaccine to the immeasurable harm caused by COVID-19 shots released under an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) in 2020—most of which are mRNA based biologicals marketed by Pfizer and Moderna that have racked up over 1.6M adverse event reports to the federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS)—it is easier to understand why the public’s trust in the agency’s vaccine recommendations has been on a downward trajectory for so long.

It is no wonder that Secretary Kennedy feels an urgent need to make significant changes at the CDC in order to protect the public health.

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