After less than a month in the job, Dr. Susan Monarez was given her marching orders as director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on 27 August 2025, after refusing to depart voluntarily, on the seemingly reasonable grounds that she was “not aligned with the President’s vision.” The Trump nominee, who had been confirmed in her position by the Senate in July and sworn in on the last day of that month, has been replaced temporarily by Jim O’ Neill, a science and technology investor and Deputy Secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) since June 2025. The new acting director is the first non-medical professional to hold that position. Dr Monarez, a microbiologist and a long-serving federal government scientist, had refused to endorse “unscientific, reckless directives” on vaccine policy from the DHSS. She has the dubious distinction of becoming the first-ever CDC director in American history to be fired by the US government. Other senior CDC officials soon resigned in sympathy, including Demetre Daskalakis (director, National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases); Debra Houry (Chief Medical Officer); Daniel Jernigan (director, National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases); and Jennifer Layden (director, Office of Public Health Data, Surveillance, and Technology).
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, the 26th Secretary of the DHHS and a “crown jewel” in the Trump administration, started out as Democratic Party royalty, being one of eleven children of the 64th Attorney General and a nephew of the 35th President of the United States. Having come to an understanding with Trump during the later stages of the 2024 Presidential campaign, he was rewarded with the nomination for Health Secretary, which was confirmed 52-48 by the Senate on 13 February 2025. The former environmental lawyer was taken on by Trump with the mandates of tackling corruption in the nation’s health agencies, restoring evidence-based science and medicine, and ending the chronic disease epidemic. He has since taken to his new job with great vigour and relish.
The CDC has been in the firing line ever since the second Trump administration took over, leading to the enforced dismissal of six hundred employees in late August. This mass layoff was preceded by a shooting incident outside the CDC headquarters in Atlanta on 8 August, by a gunman who was driven by vaccine misinformation and had attributed his own mental health issues to the COVID vaccine. His actions led to the untimely death of David Rose, a 33-year-old DeKalb County police officer. The shooter, 30-year-old Patrick Joseph White, shot himself dead after firing more than 500 rounds at six buildings in the CDC complex.
RFK Jr hopes to restore “public trust” in vaccines, while proclaiming his own reservations in the matter. His views on the coronavirus pandemic were publicised in his 2021 book on ‘The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health’, in which one chapter bears the title ‘Hyping Phony Epidemics Crying Wolf.’ In keeping with his opinions, Kennedy has restricted eligibility for COVID-19 vaccination to those aged 65 and older and to those with risk factors for severe coronavirus infection, while withholding $500 million in grants for research into mRNA vaccines. He also has the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) in his sights. In June 2025, he fired all 17 members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). His first eight replacements, including some coronavirus sceptics, are all “committed to evidence-based medicine, gold-standard science, and common sense.” Uniquely, he has even asked for the retraction of a paper that was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine on July 15 2025 as “Aluminium-adsorbed vaccines in chronic diseases in childhood: A nationwide cohort study”-a study of 1, 224, 176 children born in Denmark between 1997 and 2018- on the grounds that he disputes the findings that no link between aluminium exposure and chronic disease could be confirmed. Kennedy’s fixation on the discredited link between the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine and autism does not bode well. Early on in his tenure, a measles outbreak in Texas saw the first death in the US from the condition since 2015 from a disease that had been declared eradicated from the country by the WHO in 2000. The measles resurgence has come about from cross-border travel to, and falling vaccine uptake within, America-the latter driven by growing vaccine scepticism among its citizens.
RFK Jr opposes fluoridation of drinking water, on the unproven grounds that fluoride, in the concentrations used for the purpose, is “associated with arthritis, bone fractures, bone cancer, IQ loss, neurodevelopmental disorders, and thyroid disease.” To give him some credit, he has also spoken out against ultra-processed foods and the widespread use of food additives, although these are more to do with poor practices in the food industry rather than direct failures of public health policy. Unfortunately, his ideologically motivated and conspiracy theory-driven reform agenda and his nostalgia for 1960s America is likely to adversely affect the very people he professes to be protecting. Americans, however, have no choice but to adhere to the newly prescribed treatments coming out of Washington DC. Only the passage of time will inform voters whether they did, in fact, make all the right choices in November 2024.
Ashis Banerjee