The Wednesday night massacre at the CDC

What's at stake for Americans in the Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s war on public health

Just three weeks ago, a gunman fired 500 rounds at the Centers for Disease Control headquarters in Atlanta, killing a police officer and himself. That’s already been lost in the noise of subsequent tragedies — abductions by masked secret police, the expanding military occupation of U.S. cities, yet another horrifying mass shooting, further needless economic destruction.

But the CDC shooter didn’t act in a vacuum — he fired 500 shots into the building because he believed the Covid vaccine had made him depressed and suicidal — a position mainstreamed by the anti-vaccination movement.

Kennedy is directly responsible for the villainization of CDC’s workforce through his continuous lies about science and vaccine safety, which have fueled a climate of hostility and mistrust,” said Fired But Fighting, a group of laid-off employees opposing changes to the CDC by President Donald Trump’s administration

CDC staffers had written to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., blaming him for stoking this month’s violence. But the alarm bells were already ringing back in June, as David Wallace-Wells wrote for The New York Times:

Richard Nixon conducted his “Saturday night massacre,” back in 1973, when one after another federal prosecutor refused to fire Archibald Cox, the Watergate prosecutor. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health and human services secretary, staged his night of the long knives a week ago Monday, firing all 17 members of the vaccine advisory board, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, in one fell swoop — a historically unprecedented action and one that broke an explicit promise he made to Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana and a physician, as a condition of his confirmation as secretary. The epidemiologist and immunologist Michael Mina called Kennedy’s move a “code red” for vaccines in America.

And this week, Secretary Kennedy was the one who attacked the CDC, executing his own Wednesday night massacre as he fired CDC Director Susan Monarez after she refused to resign. It’s the latest in a series of moves by the Health and Human Services secretary (who, even seven months into his project to “Make America Healthy Again,” seems to have picked up little understanding of his adopted field) that run counter to the notion that the agency is meant to work for the improvement of public health. Monarez had reportedly refused to fire qualified staffers or enact vaccination recommendations that rejected science.

The firing has provoked a strong response. Most visibly, four other top CDC officials — CDC Chief Medical Officer Debra Houry, CDC Director of Public Health Data Jennifer Layden, Director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases Daniel Jernigan, and Director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases Demetre Daskalakis — quit, and the staff of the agency walked out of work in protest.

These actions came not out of ideological disagreement (Monarez was a Trump appointee, not a deep-state opponent), but were meant to call attention to the sheer gravity of Kennedy’s reckless move to disable or dismantle public health efforts. As Monarez’s lawyers Mark Zaid and Abbe Lowell said in a statement:

This is not about one official. It is about the systematic dismantling of public health institutions, the silencing of experts, and the dangerous politicization of science. The attack on Dr. Monarez is a warning to every American: Our evidence-based systems are being undermined from within.

The letters from the longtime CDC leaders who resigned in support are damning indictments of RFK, Jr.'s project, and the threat he represents. As Daskalakis put it in his resignation letter:

I am 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,” he added.

Meanwhile, Monarez is being replaced as interim CDC director by Jim O’Neill, a longtime Peter Thiel ally and biotech investor who has no medical experience. He’s called for drugs to be assessed only for safety, suggesting that the market can be trusted to figure out efficacy in the field. Surgeon and writer Atul Gawande wrote of O’Neill’s appointment:

Has America run out of actual health practitioners with demonstrated experience improving public health outcomes? Or maybe it is just ones willing to betray the tenets and beneficiaries of public health that Trump and RFK Jr want them to do.

And more immediately, just as the fall respiratory illness season approaches, the pharmacy chain CVS is already restricting access to Covid vaccines.

“Can you get the vaccine? Technically you can,” said Michael Osterholm, a University of Minnesota infectious-disease expert who helped launch a new initiative aimed at preserving vaccine access in the United States. “But the roadblocks are so significant, it almost guarantees most people won't.”

As Leana S. Wen writes for The Washington Post, the worst may be yet to come; childhood immunizations are already on the MAHA hit list, she warns.

Childhood vaccines could be next on the chopping block. The advisory committee is already considering pulling hepatitis B immunizations and the measles, mumps, rubella and varicella vaccine from the standard schedule of shots that nearly all kids receive. At a recent Cabinet meeting, Kennedy hinted at a major announcement next month. “We’re finding interventions, certain interventions now that are clearly, almost certainly causing autism,” he said. Given his years of activism promotingthe thoroughly debunked link between vaccines and autism and his hiring of discredited vaccine skeptic David Geier to lead the federal government “study” on the topic, the outcome seems all but predetermined.

The country is already experiencing a resurgence of measles, an illness just recently considered eliminated by vaccination programs. Should the country continue down this path, others are sure to follow, and that’s an invitation to revisit some of the worst health crises of the past, in pursuit of an ideological victory. What’s happening under Secretary Kennedy, one former CDC staffer told Rolling Stone, is “the work of a death cult.”

Since his appointment, Congress has so far hardly moved to contain Secretary Kennedy — even as he’s reneged on his promises to protect vaccine availability, there has been little pushback to his efforts to remake public health in his image, as Chelsea Cirruzzo and Isabella Cueto wrote for Stat News.

If there remained any doubt about whether Kennedy would go “wild on health,” as President Trump promised last year, the ouster of top leaders at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has only solidified his standing. Kennedy has faced practically no opposition from the White House or lawmakers amid the turmoil.

In the context of Congress’s ongoing handover of its oversight powers to the executive branch, this comes as no surprise. But Kennedy’s reshuffling of HHS and CDC staff isn’t just an ideological threat, or owning the libs — it endangers every American.

And it’s possible that Republican leaders are beginning to notice — finally, it’s not just Democrats objecting to what Kennedy is doing (even if at this point, only Democrats are calling for his resignation). Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions — who cast the critical vote to confirm the Secretary in exchange for assurances from Kennedy that at HHS he would be restrained by science — has finally asserted some authority, calling for a postponement of the September vaccine advisory panel meeting until Congress can figure out what’s going on:

Serious allegations have been made about the meeting agenda, membership, and lack of scientific process being followed for the now announced September ACIP meeting. These decisions directly impact children’s health and the meeting should not occur until significant oversight has been conducted. If the meeting proceeds, any recommendations made should be rejected as lacking legitimacy given the seriousness of the allegations and the current turmoil in CDC leadership.

Secretary Kennedy is set to testify before Congress next week. Removal is difficult to envision; even serious oversight may be unlikely — no matter Kennedy’s broken promises to Senator Cassidy, or how alarmed Senator Susan Collins might be — but it’s essential. The question is whether Cassidy can at last find the courage to act on behalf of the people.

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