CDC Firings: Wake up, America, Public Health Needs You

CDC

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Editor's Note: A CDC rally is currently underway outside the Atlanta headquarters as of 4:40 EST on August 28, 2025.

Some news can paralyze you. It steals your breath and makes your blood run cold. Your mind goes hunting for meaning—anything to make sense of the horror in front of you. As a journalist, it can be challenging to translate those facts into both emotional validation and actionable insights for the reader. But often, the sort of news that leaves you frozen also leaves you aching to do something—anything—in response to the horrors you’re witnessing. You want someone to say, “I know. I feel it too. And here’s what you can do.” That’s how I felt when I first heard the news that Susan Monarez, PhD, was being removed from her position as CDC Director—and that several senior CDC officials had resigned in the aftermath.

Wake up, America. This isn’t normal.

Monarez, whom Secretary Kennedy said he “handpicked” for the job, was told to leave her position as director less than a month after being sworn in. When asked why Monarez was being removed, the White House stated that Monarez “was not aligned with the president’s agenda.”

Attorneys for Monarez stated, “When CDC Director Susan Monarez refused to rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives and fire dedicated health experts, she chose protecting the public over serving a political agenda. For that, she has been targeted. Dr. Monarez has neither resigned nor received notification from the White House that she has been fired, and as a person of integrity and devoted to science, she will not resign.”

Senior officials of CDC who stepped down from their positions in response to the news include Dr Daniel Jernigan (Director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases), Dr Demetre Daskalakis (Director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases), Dr Debra Houry (Chief Medical Officer), and, most recently, Dr Jen Layden (Director of the Office of Public Health Data, Surveillance and Technology).

In her resignation letter, Dr Debra Houry writes that “the ongoing changes prevent me from continuing in my job as a leader of the agency.” In her letter, she speaks out against “the overstating of risks and the rise of misinformation that have cost lives” and “proposed budget cuts and reorganization plans that will negatively impact CDC’s ability to address health conditions, worsening the nation’s health.”

Dr Jernigan wrote that “given the current context in the Department, he felt it best to offer his resignation, a very difficult decision after serving the American people through meaningful and impactful work for over 30 years.”

The words of Dr Daskalakis' resignation letter are sobering. He writes, “This decision has not come easily, as I deeply value the work that the CDC does in safeguarding public health and am proud of my contributions to that critical mission. However, after much contemplation and reflection on recent developments and perspectives brought to light by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., I find that the views he and his staff have shared challenge my ability to continue in my current role at the agency and in the service of the health of the American people.

He furthermore writes, “The intentional eroding of trust in low-risk vaccines, favoring natural infection and unproven remedies, will bring us to a pre-vaccine era where only the strong will survive and many, if not all, will suffer. I believe in nutrition and exercise. I believe in making our food supply healthier, and I also believe in using vaccines to prevent death and disability.” Read full resignation letters here.

How To Respond to This News

Some news leaves you paralyzed. It leaves you unsure how to act. But we, my dear friends and colleagues in infectious disease and public health, cannot afford to remain paralyzed amidst the news of this week or amidst the ongoing slaughter of this nation’s public health agencies over the past 7 months. We must rise. For the health of this nation, we must rise.

In times like these, it’s always helpful to seek historical context for recent events. It’s essential to ground ourselves in lessons of the past when chaos is unfolding around us. Yet, throughout its history, CDC has operated with a significant degree of independence, free from political pressures. The agency weathered HIV/AIDs, Ebola, H1N1, and Zika, leading the nation through one crisis after another, without the wholesale decapitation of vital leadership that we’re seeing now. That is, until COVID-19.

If we look back through history, the one precedent we find where political interference has resulted in lost credibility, fractured trust, and undue loss of life is the COVID-19 pandemic. The parallel here is frightening. And the silence throughout the rest of history, palpable. This political interference is not “Making America Healthy Again.”

As Dr Deb Houry noted in her resignation letter, “For the good of the nation and the world, the science at CDC should never be censored or subject to political pauses or interpretations.”

In his resignation letter, Dr Demetre Daskalakis writes, “Having worked in local and national public health for years, I have never experienced such radical non-transparency, nor have I seen such unskilled manipulation of data to achieve a political end rather than the good of the American people. Enough is enough.”This level of political intrusion is not normal, at all – And it’s a warning sign.

Over the past 7 months, public health leaders have sounded the alarm bells, stating that the experts are not being called to the table for critical public health decisions. We are witnessing a dangerous new norm – one that exchanges expert guidance for political agenda—and one that echoes the experiences of many public health leaders during the COVID-19 pandemic.

A Call to Action

I promised myself that in reporting this news, I would do more than just report the facts for all to read. I vowed to leave you with a call to action. I believe there’s something that each of us can do in response to the events we’re witnessing. We have a responsibility to utilize our unique opportunities for influence to speak out against political interference in public health. I hope the ideas below will help you move forward in your own activism, from feeling paralyzed to catalyzing change.

• Make noise—on the record.
  Do not stay silent. Publish statements from your hospital, health department, state governments, professional societies, and healthcare practices. Share these statements widely. Ask your organization to reaffirm its commitment to evidence-based recommendations (including for immunizations), transparent data, and non-interference with scientific expertise. Send your statements to local media and your elected officials; place op-eds; testify at city/county health boards.

• Demand oversight and paper trails.
  Call and email your members of Congress, urging hearings on (a) ACIP dismissals, (b) the CDC leadership crisis, and (c) narrowed vaccine access. Ask for: publication of the decision memos; transparent access to data; a record of meeting minutes for critical scientific decisions; commitments to restore independent advisory processes, free of political will; and protection of career scientists from retaliation.

• Fortify state & local data.
  Do not let surveillance and evidence-based recommendations go dark. Partner with universities and health systems to protect key datasets and public health recommendations, maintain rapid reporting pipelines for respiratory viruses and outbreaks, and publish local dashboards. Build redundancy now, in case we need it later.

• Stand with (and as) whistleblowers.
  Stand with CDC and other public health officials. Interference thrives in silence; it retreats when insiders document and surface it. I’ve said it before, and I will say it again: “In the end, history will write the truth. And it will tell the story not of a public health system that lied, but of a government that scapegoated science to avoid accountability.” Establish safe reporting channels within your institution for reporting instances of political interference. Know your rights. Support colleagues who raise alarms. Encourage your professional societies to take a stand.

• Flood the zone with credible education.

As healthcare, infection prevention, and public health professionals, we must continue providing simple, accurate educational information for the public. We need trusted local voices – pediatricians, obstetricians, pharmacists, school nurses, and others –to build a source of truth that people can turn to. Short talks, 90-second videos, and FAQs can help dispel misinformation and disciplined education: consistent facts, delivered by credible voices, must be repeated often. Take the message to where people gather and create easily accessible guidance. We have an opportunity to use our collective voices to correct false claims in the exam rooms and on our university webpages.

We cannot afford paralysis. Not this week, not this year, not ever. We wait anxiously, wondering what’s next as CDC’s leadership continues to be gutted and purged by this administration. But we cannot wait in silence. We cannot wait for someone else to act. Decades of experience have been lost to political agenda. The public’s health depends on scientists doing their jobs free from political edits. That will only happen if we continue to insist on it, together.