Kennedy has repeatedly sidelined CDC officials, ignored established research, circumvented scientific protocols, and pushed a vaccine agenda rooted in ideology and not science, say Dr. Debra Houry, CDC\u2019s former chief medical officer; Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, the agency\u2019s ex-vaccine chief; and Dr. Daniel Jernigan, who led the department that oversees vaccine safety. <\/p>\n
Kennedy has stacked a key vaccine-advisory committee with vaccine opponents and granted special status to a vaccine skeptic allowing him unhampered access to part of a sensitive CDC vaccine database, they say. His office has, without explanation, held up a data project that CDC scientists say would make the agency\u2019s data more transparent. And he has made major policy decisions, including changing vaccine recommendations, without consulting top CDC scientists, the former officials say.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Houry, Daskalakis, and Jernigan resigned on Aug. 27, the same day the White House fired CDC Director Susan Monarez. Jennifer Layden, another top CDC official, also resigned. The four former officials spoke to TIME this week.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou get to the point where if you stay, you\u2019re complicit,\u201d Daskalakis says. \u201cI couldn\u2019t just sit there and not say this is horribly wrong.\u201d In his resignation letter, the former director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases wrote that he could no longer serve \u201cin an environment that treats CDC as a tool to generate policies and materials that do not reflect scientific reality and are designed to hurt rather than to improve the public\u2019s health.\u201d<\/p>\n
Monarez wrote in an op-ed<\/a> published in the Wall Street Journal on Sept. 4 that she was instructed by Kennedy in a recent meeting to rubber-stamp all recommendations from the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), an independent group that is supposed to advise the CDC director on vaccines<\/a>, even though the director isn\u2019t required to accept its recommendations. In an unprecedented move, Kennedy fired all ACIP members in June and replaced them with his allies, including several vaccine opponents.\u00a0<\/p>\n Monarez wrote that she was fired because she refused to compromise science.<\/p>\n \u201cI hit my line when it became clear that Susan was being totally sidelined on the topic of vaccines,\u201d Daskalakis says. \u201cACIP is being led by ideologues that don\u2019t have regard for science. I know how this story ends. It will limit the ability of people to get vaccines.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Kennedy defended the CDC shakeup during a Senate Finance Committee hearing on Sept. 4, saying that the changes were necessary to \u201crestore the agency to its role as the world\u2019s gold-standard public health agency.\u201d He said Monarez lied about the factors that had led to her firing and that he didn\u2019t have a private meeting with her.<\/p>\n HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon said in a statement to TIME that more changes should be expected at CDC. <\/p>\n “Secretary Kennedy has been clear: the 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,” Nixon said.<\/p>\n Read More: Xi and Putin Discuss Becoming \u2018Immortal.\u2019 Their Countries Are Investing In It<\/a><\/p>\n Monarez had earlier tried to appoint a new designated federal official for ACIP, but had been blocked by Kennedy\u2019s office, Houry says. The official attends committee meetings and ensures members are complying with federal law and the correct protocols. Monarez had wanted to appoint someone with more legal and policy experience to the role given the inexperience of most current ACIP members, Houry says. \u201cThe final straw for me was when Susan couldn\u2019t make that change. Any hope I had in scientific integrity was gone.\u201d<\/p>\n At its first meeting in June, the new ACIP committee heard a presentation on the risks of thimerosal<\/a>, a preservative that anti-vaccine activists have claimed is linked to autism. CDC scientists prepared a document for the meeting that showed, based on multiple studies, no link between thimerosal in vaccines to autism or other neurodevelopmental disorders. (For more than two decades, thimerosal has not been used in childhood vaccines except for flu vaccines in multi-dose vials. Most flu vaccines in the U.S. are given in single-dose vials that don\u2019t contain thimerosal.) The document was initially posted online but was taken down on the day of the meeting at the behest of Kennedy\u2019s office, Daskalakis says. <\/p>\n \u201cThey were cherrypicking what they wanted the American public to see,\u201d he says.\u00a0<\/p>\n ACIP recommended that thimerosal be removed from all vaccines. HHS said in July that it was adopting the committee\u2019s recommendation. <\/p>\n One of the key roles of the CDC is to provide scientific data and analyses to the Health Secretary and others, including ACIP, to help guide public-health policy and recommendations. But Daskalakis, Houry, and Jernigan say Kennedy barely engaged with CDC staff and disregarded CDC data that was provided, particularly related to vaccines.\u00a0<\/p>\n Daskalakis and Houry say they offered to brief Kennedy on a variety of public-health issues but were never invited to do so. Jernigan, former director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, says members of his staff were invited to a single scientific meeting with Kennedy, which took place in August and focused on Lyme disease. Jernigan says HHS staff told his team to avoid discussing the Lyme disease vaccine<\/a>, which is under development for people. <\/p>\n Jernigan, Houry, and Daskalakis say they were in a meeting in May with other top CDC officials when they learned, via the social-media platform X, that Kennedy had announced a change to the CDC\u2019s recommended vaccine schedules.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cRadical transparency? Well, that\u2019s not how you want to find out about COVID vaccine guidance,\u201d Houry says.\u00a0<\/p>\n Layden, a fourth CDC official who resigned last week, said she left the agency because recent budget and staffing cuts, coupled with a lack of leadership support, had made it impossible for her to do her job. Layden was the director of CDC\u2019s Office of Public Health Data, Surveillance and Technology, which oversees the agency\u2019s data-modernization efforts. She says her group had recently completed a new website that centralizes data of all reportable infectious diseases. The CDC currently has separate websites for each disease, which can be hard to navigate.<\/p>\n \u201cThe idea was to create a one-stop shop,\u201d Layden says.\u00a0<\/p>\n But Kennedy\u2019s office needs to greenlight the website before it can be made public. \u201cWe never got the approval to release it,\u201d Layden says. \u201cNo reasoning has been given.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Not publishing a website that provides clearer data is \u201cinconsistent with being transparent,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n![\"Clapout](\"https:\/\/time.com\/redesign\/_next\/image\/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fapi.time.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2025%2F09%2Fcdc-leaders.jpg&w=3840&q=75\"\/)
A day after their resignation, former CDC officials Dan Jernigan, Deb Houry and Demetre Daskalakis were honored by CDC employees and supporters outside the CDC’s global headquarters on August 28, 2025 in Atlanta, Georgia. Elijah Nouvelage\u2014Getty Images<\/p>\n