Vaccines, vitamins and a fatal shooting: Five big collisions between RFK and CDC scientists before director was fired

Washington: The White House has fired the director of the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention after she refused to resign amid pressure from the Trump administration to change vaccine policy.

Lawyers for Susan Monarez accused Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr of “weaponising public health for political gain” and “putting millions of American lives at risk” by purging health officials from government.

Following Monarez’s abrupt exit, weeks after the Senate confirmed her to lead the CDC, at least three top CDC officials announced their resignations.

The backlash to her ouster marks the latest instance of Kennedy, the founder of an anti-vaccine organisation who last year called the CDC a “cesspool of corruption”, clashing with agency scientists since he became the nation’s top health official in February. Here’s what to know:

1. Mass HHS lay-offs and restructuring purge ranks of CDC

Days after Kennedy was sworn into office, several thousand federal health workers, including some at the CDC, started receiving notices that they would be terminated.

The notices came in a mass firing and restructuring. Budget cuts and additional lay-offs came in the following weeks.

Although administration officials have said they’re remaking federal health agencies to save money, improve efficiency and prevent waste, public health employees say Kennedy’s approach undermines their work. Many of the firings have been paused while they are challenged in court.

2. Kennedy replaces members of independent vaccine committee

In June, Kennedy ousted all 17 members of the CDC’s advisory committee on immunisation practices and replaced them with his appointees, most of whom have criticised coronavirus vaccine policies.

Weeks later, that committee announced plans to review the cumulative health effects of the entire childhood immunisation schedule, alarming public health experts who said the safety of the vaccines has been extensively evaluated.

Two of Kennedy’s appointees had testified against vaccine manufacturers as expert witnesses in lawsuits, and another served on the board of the nation’s oldest anti-vaccine group.

In a commentary article published in JAMA, a journal published by the American Medical Association, the 17 members of the advisory committee who had been fired said the abrupt dismissals, appointment of new members and reduction of CDC staff dedicated to immunisations “have left the US vaccine program critically weakened”.

Kennedy, who has long criticised the advisory panel, wrote in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece that the advisory committee had been “plagued with persistent conflicts of interest” and had become a “rubber stamp” for vaccines. He referred to 97 per cent of committee members having “omissions” in previous disclosure forms.

The committee’s voting members disclose conflicts of interest at the start of each meeting. An investigation by public broadcaster NPR before the purge refuted Kennedy’s assertions, finding they were based on a report he mischaracterised and that some omissions included people putting information “in the wrong section of the form or incompletely filling out a section, or reviewers forgetting to initial and date amendments to the pages”.

3. Two CDC experts quit, cite changes at agency

In May, Kennedy bypassed CDC staff and the committee to say US health officials would no longer recommend coronavirus vaccines for healthy children and healthy pregnant women.

Kennedy accused the Biden administration of having “urged healthy children to get yet another COVID shot despite the lack of any clinical data to support the repeat booster strategy in children”. Major medical associations criticised Kennedy’s decision and continue to recommend coronavirus vaccines to children and pregnant patients.

Top CDC expert Lakshmi Panagiotakopoulos, who co-led a coronavirus vaccine work group of CDC staff and outside experts that assisted the advisory committee in crafting guidance for the shots, stepped down in response.

Panagiotakopoulos wrote in an email to colleagues that she worried she could no longer help “the most vulnerable members of our population” after the government rescinded long-standing recommendations to immunise children and pregnant women.

Fiona Havers, who oversaw CDC respiratory virus data and was in charge of presenting it to the advisory committee, stepped down the week after the administration’s removal of committee members. She had led the agency’s surveillance of hospitalisations for coronavirus and respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, a common respiratory virus that is the leading cause of hospitalisations in infants.

“Unfortunately, I no longer have confidence that these data will be used objectively or evaluated with appropriate scientific rigor to make evidence-based vaccine policy decisions,” Havers said in a June 16 email to colleagues.

4. Kennedy orders CDC to promote vitamin as measles treatment

During his years as an anti-vaccine activist, Kennedy criticised measles shots and touted vitamin A as a treatment. This northern spring, he used his position as HHS secretary to tout the vitamin to combat an outbreak in Texas and directed the CDC to include it in guidance for caring for patients.

Experts say vitamin A can be beneficial for supportive care after someone has gotten sick from measles, but it is generally used in countries where children are malnourished, and they stress it is not a replacement for vaccination to prevent the illness.

CDC employees were frustrated they could not include the risks of excessive vitamin A in its guidance, several previously told The Washington Post. They were able to include that information in a health alert weeks later, after children in the Texas outbreak showed up at local hospitals with signs of vitamin A toxicity.

5. CDC shooting leaves employees angry at Kennedy, Trump

On August 8, a gunman fired hundreds of bullets at the CDC’s Atlanta headquarters, killing a police officer before the gunman fatally shot himself. According to law enforcement officials, neighbours and his father, the shooter blamed the coronavirus vaccine for his health problems.

For many staff at the agency, the attack compounded their anger at US President Donald Trump, who has still not publicly addressed the shooting, and Kennedy, who has accused the CDC of “corruption” and previously – and falsely – described the coronavirus vaccine as the “deadliest vaccine ever made”.

In an open letter after the shooting, hundreds of the agency’s employees accused Kennedy of “terminating critical CDC workers in a destroy-first-and-ask-questions-later manner” and “wasting taxpayer money while creating dangerous gaps in areas like infectious disease detection, worker safety, and chronic disease prevention and response”. And later that month, hundreds of agency staffers received permanent termination notices.

The Washington Post

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