RFK Jr.’s Vaccine Agenda Gets Boost From Key CDC Leaders’ Exit

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s overhaul of CDC leadership destabilizes the key public health office, paving the way for the top US health official to pursue a broader agenda hostile to vaccines.

The departure of high-level leaders is significant, as they drove efforts to draft respiratory vaccine recommendations, oversaw foodborne illnesses, and coordinated policies across the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Without them, Kennedy has more power to take control of the agency’s operations and scrutinize vaccines beyond his current efforts targeting the Covid-19 shot, former agency leaders say.

“He’s now coming for the whole childhood vaccine immunization schedule and definitely coming for other vaccines,” said Fiona Havers, the former lead for CDC’s respiratory virus hospitalization network team who left the agency in June to protest Kennedy’s dismantling of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.

Kennedy is “potentially limiting access to the schedule for other vaccines that have been available to Americans for decades,” Havers said in an interview.

President Donald Trump this week fired CDC director Susan Monarez after she clashed with Kennedy over his vaccine skepticism, sparking resistance from other leaders.

Three senior agency leaders resigned immediately—Chief Medical Officer Debra Houry, National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases Director Demetre Daskalakis, and National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases Director Daniel Jernigan.

Daskalakis, in a resignation letter posted to social media site X, said he was “unable to serve in 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’s health. The recent change in the adult and children’s immunization schedule threaten the lives of the youngest Americans and pregnant people.”

ACIP Meeting

Kennedy’s next moves with vaccines are expected to play out in the upcoming ACIP meeting slated to start Sept. 18, which includes discussions of the hepatitis B; measles, mumps, rubella, varicella; and Covid-19 vaccines.

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), whose vote was key in securing Kennedy’s confirmation to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, is urging the secretary to delay the meeting, saying in a statement that should the agenda proceed, “any recommendations made should be rejected as lacking legitimacy.”

Earlier this year, Kennedy fired all 17 ACIP advisers and replaced them with his own picks, tilted heavily toward vaccine skeptics.

Noel Brewer, a former ACIP member who was replaced by Kennedy, said in an interview that while the current ACIP secretary—Mina Zadeh—“may know how to run things administratively,” she lacks experience in vaccination.

“When you lose the people who write and defend the playbook, you lose the playbook,” Tony Yang, a professor of health policy at George Washington University, said in an email.

A new “playbook,” however, is likely to emerge. In an interview this week on Fox News, Kennedy said the CDC needed to align more with Trump’s agenda.

“We need to look at the priorities of the agency, if there’s really a deeply, deeply embedded, I would say, malaise at the agency,” Kennedy said. “And we need strong leadership that will go in there and that will be able to execute on President Trump’s broad ambitions.”

While ACIP is an independent panel that makes recommendations to the CDC, the departure of Monarez and her deputies removes a layer of friction between the panel and the decisions the centers ultimately make on vaccines. One of Monarez’s reported concerns was with rubber stamping ACIP recommendations that ran contrary to science.

A former CDC official said that typically, before an ACIP meeting, agency directors get scientific information, weigh in on critical questions and what key votes will be, and eventually decide on whether to accept final recommendations.

After firing Monarez, the Trump administration announced HHS deputy secretary Jim O’Neill would serve as the CDC’s acting director.

O’Neill doesn’t have public health or medical training, the former CDC official said, warning he may just approve Kennedy’s priorities.

In the last vaccine advisory meeting under Kennedy’s purview, the freshly minted ACIP members recommended scrapping the mercury-based preservative thimerosal from influenza vaccines. Dozens of studies have found that ingredient to be safe, according to the University of Minnesota.

Nevertheless, the CDC adopted the ACIP recommendation.

With the former leadership gone, analysis that cuts against the views of Kennedy’s vaccine agenda may not get out via agency channels, another former HHS official said.

Tracking Other Diseases

The agency’s plans for responding to other infectious diseases and future pandemics could also change following the recent departures.

Leadership exits came days after the agency reported the first US human case of screwworm linked to an ongoing outbreak in Central America. Measles cases this year have climbed to the highest level in the US in three decades. And recent outbreaks such as salmonella linked to eggs are ongoing.

“This is beyond childhood vaccinations and routine vaccinations—all of these emerging diseases that are now becoming more common in the US, or the first time in a long time that we’ve had them,” said Ana Santos Rutschman, a vaccine law professor at Villanova University.

“This is the beginning to spread beyond measles vaccines and the ones that were known not to be championed by them,” she said.