Hello and welcome to the details of Directors who quit US health agency warn it is ‘destroying’ protections and now with the details
Nevin Al Sukari - Sana'a - US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr on August 28, 2025, lashed out at the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) a day after its director Susan Monarez was ousted, saying the storied agency has ‘problems’ and needs to be overhauled. — AFP pic
WASHINGTON, Sept 1 — Senior experts who recently resigned in protest from the top US public health agency denounced yesterday growing politicisation of the organisation, warning of a breakdown in the “firewall” between science and ideology.
US President Donald Trump plunged American health policy and scientific rigor deeper into crisis this past week when he fired the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Susan Monarez, after less than one month on the job.
Monarez had clashed with vaccine sceptic Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr over his vaccine policy overhaul.
Vaccines are safe and effective, according to overwhelming consensus of the scientific community, but critics say the Trump administration has gone out of its way to sow doubt, especially regarding Covid-19 vaccinations.
Monarez’s ouster triggered the departure of five other senior CDC officials, including Demetre Daskalakis as director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.
“I’ve been worried for months,” Daskalakis told the ABC News Sunday show This Week, speaking of the impact the gutting of the historically independent CDC agency will have on public health.
“The firewall between science and ideology has completely broken down,” he said.
Daskalakis added that based on what he has seen since Trump’s January inauguration, and the packing of a critical immunisation advisory committee with people who share Kennedy’s scepticism on vaccines, “they’re really moving in an ideologic direction, where they want to see the undoing of vaccination.”
Another expert who resigned in protest, doctor Debra Houry, who served as the CDC’s chief medical officer, said she knew of no agency scientist who has briefed Kennedy since he took up his post.
“I think it’s going to be very difficult to” trust the CDC moving forward, she told CNN yesterday.
As for members of the Advisory Committee on Immunisation Practices (ACIP) set to meet in mid-September, Houry warned it will be staffed with people who are “known to be against vaccines.”
Kennedy dismissed all members of the influential group and replaced them with his own nominees, in a move that sparked concern in Congress, even among Republicans.
‘Under assault’
Senator Bill Cassidy, a Republican who chairs the Senate health committee, has called for the indefinite postponement of the September 18 ACIP meeting due to a “lack of scientific process being followed.”
Former CDC director Tom Frieden spoke critically of the chaos at the CDC, an institution central to improving American health outcomes for more than 80 years.
“Public health is under assault,” he told CNN, pointing to Kennedy’s systematic “undermining” of vaccine infrastructure.
“They’re destroying our health protections. We are less safe.”
Another former CDC head, Richard Besser, said he worries Americans will be at “incredible risk” when the next health crisis strikes.
“With the director being removed, senior leadership leaving, I have great fears for what will happen to this country the next time we face a public health emergency” including the next pandemic, he told ABC News.
Progressive Senator Bernie Sanders, who is on the health committee with Cassidy, said in a blistering opinion piece in yesterday’s New York Times that Kennedy’s “longstanding crusade against vaccines” should disqualify him from running the Department of Health and Human Services.
Kennedy “is endangering the health of the American people now and into the future. He must resign,” Sanders wrote. — AFP
These were the details of the news Directors who quit US health agency warn it is ‘destroying’ protections for this day. We hope that we have succeeded by giving you the full details and information. To follow all our news, you can subscribe to the alerts system or to one of our different systems to provide you with all that is new.
It is also worth noting that the original news has been published and is available at Malay Mail and the editorial team at AlKhaleej Today has confirmed it and it has been modified, and it may have been completely transferred or quoted from it and you can read and follow this news from its main source.
