{"id":155233,"date":"2025-09-23T11:08:09","date_gmt":"2025-09-23T11:08:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/155233\/"},"modified":"2025-09-23T11:08:09","modified_gmt":"2025-09-23T11:08:09","slug":"kennedys-staff-warn-that-he-is-dismantling-us-public-health","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/155233\/","title":{"rendered":"Kennedy\u2019s staff warn that he is dismantling US public health"},"content":{"rendered":"

You can listen to this story on this week\u2019s episode of The Slow Newscast, Contagion: RFK Jr\u2019s war on public health, here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention \u2013 once the global gold standard for national health agencies \u2013 has been so damaged by the sackings and ideological redirection instigated by Robert Kennedy, the secretary of health and human services (HHS), that it is no longer capable of protecting America from the next pandemic, agency staff have told The Observer.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey are systematically dismantling public health in America and everything that we do so that we don\u2019t work effectively,\u201d said one employee. \u201cI think they\u2019re not going to stop until they have effectively destroyed the CDC.\u201d<\/p>\n

One former worker, Abby Tighe, said that under Kennedy\u2019s leadership, the agency\u2019s emerging disease surveillance capabilities were being dismantled.\ufeff \u201cThe priorities of this administration are isolationist,\u201d she said. \u201cThey don\u2019t want to engage with other countries. But that doesn\u2019t make sense when diseases travel around the world as people do.\u201d<\/p>\n

The implications are chilling, said Dr Dominik Zenner, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Queen Mary University of London. \u201cOne country alone cannot control a global epidemic,\u201d he said. \u201cThe CDC\u2019s expertise in disease surveillance and lab testing cannot be overestimated; I am in awe of what they do. In the west, they are by far the largest in expertise and capacity, operating in a different league to the rest. Could another country step up to build that capacity? I\u2019m not sure that\u2019s possible.\u201d<\/p>\n

The CDC, founded in 1946, played a critical role in eradicating smallpox; containing the Ebola virus in west Africa and helping to develop a vaccine; almost wiping out polio; and dealing with the HIV\/Aids crisis.<\/p>\n

It reported the first known cases, created the term \u201cacquired immunodeficiency syndrome\u201d to replace doctor\u2019s original \u201cgay-related immunodeficiency disease\u201d, identified the cause and developed the first blood tests for HIV. In 2023, however, Kennedy told New York Magazine that \u201cthere are much better candidates than HIV for what causes Aids\u201d.<\/p>\n

Kennedy is a curious figure in US politics. His uncle John Kennedy and father, Robert Kennedy, were assassinated within five years of each other. This hit the 11 Kennedy kids hard, and y\ufeffoung Robert was using heroin within two years of his father\u2019s death \u2013 he was just 15. He was an addict for 14 years, then an environmental lawyer and a vaccine sceptic, claiming incorrectly that vaccines cause autism. His short run for president in 2024 as an independent ended that August when he pulled out and endorsed Donald Trump, reportedly in exchange for a cabinet post.<\/p>\n

In February, Trump put him in charge of licensing medicines at the Food and Drug Administration, funding medical research at the National Institutes of Health and public health at the CDC. Kennedy got to work immediately.<\/p>\n

In June, he cut US support for Gavi, which distributes vaccines to the world\u2019s poorest children and sacked the CDC\u2019s Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP), which draws up the agency\u2019s list of recommended vaccines for Americans, and replaced it with a handpicked panel of advisors including a number of vaccine sceptics.<\/p>\n

In July, he cut the CDC\u2019s HIV prevention programmes. He also called, unsuccessfully, for a Danish study that found no link between aluminium in vaccines and chronic diseases in children to be retracted by the journal Annals of Internal Medicine.<\/p>\n

In August, he fired Susan Monarez, the CDC\u2019s director,\u00a0who last week told senators she was dismissed \u201cfor holding the line on scientific integrity\u201d after refusing Kennedy\u2019s demands to fire top CDC scientists and to sign off on the vaccine recommendations made by the ACIP. In an unprecedented rebuke, US health insurance body America\u2019s Health Insurance Plans has told patients it will not change its existing vaccination plans whatever the CDC advises.<\/p>\n

Four senior officials \u2013 the chief medical officer, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases and director of the office of public health data \u2013 resigned in support. Elizabeth Soda, one of more than 1,000 doctors and health workers who signed a letter demanding Kennedy\u2019s resignation, explained why she had followed suit. \u201cI swore an oath when I joined the CDC to protect against threats,\u201d she told The Observer.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd I think right now, RFK Jr and what\u2019s happening at HHS is a huge threat, not only to Americans, but to the global public health community.\u201d<\/p>\n

When The Observer put these concerns to the HHS, communications director Andrew Nixon sent the following statement: \u201cThe CDC has been broken for a long time. Restoring it as the world\u2019s most trusted guardian of public health will take sustained reform and more personnel changes. His 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many former and current CDC staff are puzzled at Trump\u2019s continued backing for Kennedy in the face of widespread outrage. \u201cDuring his first term, Donald Trump was responsible for Operation Warp Speed, which spent billions of dollars on a military style operation to research Covid vaccines and pay for manufacturing hundreds of millions of doses,\u201d explains Anne Schuchat, who led the CDC\u2019s Covid response. \u201cThat was a gutsy move. President Trump ought to be very proud. I don\u2019t think he\u2019s anti-science.\u201d<\/p>\n

Daniele Sudsataya, a researcher at the London School of Economics, thinks what happened to the Maga base under lockdown affected Trump\u2019s attitude. \u201cPolicymakers and public health institutions were making Covid policies \ufeffdesigned for big cities, which were hit most aggressively,\u201d he explains.<\/p>\n

\u201cRural communities were hit differently. There wasn\u2019t the same density of people or coming and going. What was tangible for some of these disconnected communities was that they couldn\u2019t open their stores. They couldn\u2019t go to restaurants. They had to be vaccinated to visit their families.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many of these areas were the Maga base where people lack employment, education and even healthcare. Kennedy\u2019s Make America Healthy Again helped Trump gain new supporters because he gave them the illusion of hope, suggests Sudsataya, saying you can take agency over your own health care<\/p>\n

That negative experience of Covid-19 increased vaccine hesitancy. A Gallup poll found that in 2019, 58% of all voters believed childhood vaccines were essential. In 2024, it remained about 60% for Democrat voters, but for Republicans, it dropped to 26%.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe president has a complex psychology,\u201d says Schuchat. \u201cI would hope he\u2019s having his doubts. I was at the leaving event for the departing directors, and the staff were uncharacteristically despondent but hopeful that as he sees the harm the secretary is causing, he will reconsider.\u201d<\/p>\n

Photograph by Alex Wroblewski\/AFP via Getty Images<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"You can listen to this story on this week\u2019s episode of The Slow Newscast, Contagion: RFK Jr\u2019s war…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":155234,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[102,2960,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-155233","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-healthcare","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-healthcare","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155233","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=155233"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155233\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/155234"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=155233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=155233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=155233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}