Trump’s New CDC Chief Fights Ouster as Top Agency Officials Step Down
Meanwhile, HHS head RFK, Jr. indicates he will release findings related to autism in September.
Susan Monarez was appointed Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) by President Donald Trump and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., becoming the agency’s first Senate-confirmed director, as mandated by a law established in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
She received the confirmation, but just a few weeks into her tenure, a post from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) indicated she was being ousted.
Dr. Susan Monarez, who was sworn in as director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on July 31, is being ousted, according to three sources familiar with the situation who spoke on the condition that they not be named because they were not authorized to share the information.
Susan Monarez is no longer director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. We thank her for her dedicated service to the American people. @SecKennedy has full confidence in his team at @CDCgov who will continue to be vigilant in protecting Americans against infectious…
— HHS.gov (@HHSGov) August 27, 2025
Three of the agency’s top officials have subsequently resigned. Apparently, they are upset about “misinformation” regarding vaccines, as well as impending staff cuts that appear to be on the horizon.
Daniel Jernigan, who led the CDC’s National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, told colleagues he was leaving due to “the current context in the Department.” The CDC’s Chief Medical Officer Debra Houry and the head of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, Demetre Deskalakis, also announced their departures.
Houry’s message to CDC staffers warned about the “rise of misinformation” about vaccines. She also argued planned cuts to the agency’s budget will hurt the CDC.
Now, The New York Times is reporting that, despite demands from RFK Jr. that she quit or be fired, Monarez is going to remain at her post.
Abbe David Lowell and Mark S. Zaid, high-profile lawyers, disputed the department’s account, saying Dr. Monarez “has neither resigned nor received notification from the White House that she has been fired, and as a person of integrity and devoted to science, she will not resign.”
Mr. Kennedy and his department, they said, “have set their sights on weaponizing public health for political gain and putting millions of American lives at risk.”
Neither Dr. Monarez nor the H.H.S. responded to requests for comment.
Dr. Monarez and Mr. Kennedy were at odds over vaccine policy, according to an administration official who is familiar with the events.
I have a few thoughts to provide additional background. To begin with, Susan Monarez worked as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Strategy and Analysis at the Executive Office of the President of the United States from January 2014 to January 2016 under Obama. In this capacity, she supposedly contributed to policy development related to health security and analysis for cross-agency initiatives.
Which is strange, because that is the period during which Dr. Anthony Fauci ignored concerns about gain-of-function research and assisted its development at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Based on that data point, I will project that she wasn’t suited for that job.
Then Monarez served as the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) during the late stages of the Biden administration, beginning her work in July 2025. In other words, she transitioned from the “acting” to the permanent position because the individual Trump originally wanted (Dr. David Weldon) did not have enough support to be confirmed in the Senate.
Weldon is a physician and former Republican congressman from Florida. Apparently, his “vaccine skepticism” and his disinclination to allow Big Pharma to dictate public health policy doomed his nomination.
In 2007, Weldon co-authored a “vaccine safety bill” with former Democratic Rep. Carolyn Maloney, which sought to give control over vaccine safety to an independent agency within HHS.
The bill, which stalled in a House subcommittee, would “provide the independence necessary to ensure that vaccine safety research is robust, unbiased, free from conflict of interest criticism, and broadly accepted by the public at large,” Weldon said in a press release announcing the bill.
Mega Thread 🧵
Meet Susan Monarez, RFK Jr’s “handpicked” candidate to run the CDC.
She’s not a doctor.
She’s not a frontline scientist.
She is a biotech insider who’s spent 20 years building public-private partnerships between the feds and Big Pharma. pic.twitter.com/vqaAqNLbgH— Champagne Joshi (@JoshWalkos) June 30, 2025
It will be interesting to see how all of this plays out in the coming weeks. To begin with, RFKJr is starting to implement his “gold standard” approach to the data used to assess policy.
.@NIH should be asking: What are seed oils, food dyes, and microplastics doing to our children?
Instead, millions are spent on fringe social studies—while chronic disease skyrockets. At HHS, we’re bringing back gold-standard science: transparent, replicated, and focused on our… pic.twitter.com/HUFZW4m5d2
— Secretary Kennedy (@SecKennedy) June 24, 2025
And because it hasn’t been used for a while, here is a summary of what the Gold Standard in Science is.
A reminder of what the Gold Standard of Science is. pic.twitter.com/th24iBuYQP
— Leslie Eastman ☥ (@Mutnodjmet) August 28, 2025
Additionally, during a press conference featuring Trump’s cabinet yesterday, RFK Jr. announced that he would present some intriguing information about autism in September.
President Trump asked Kennedy for a progress update during a Cabinet meeting Tuesday, saying, “The autism is such a tremendous horror show. What’s happening in our country and some other countries, but mostly our country. How are you doing?”
“We are doing very well,” Kennedy responded. “We will have announcements as promised in September, finding interventions, certain interventions, now that are clearly almost certainly causing autism. And we’re going to be able to address those in September.”
RFK Jr.: ‘By September we will know what has caused the autism epidemic’ and ‘eliminate those exposures’ | Nathaniel Weixel, The Hill
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has launched a “massive testing and research effort” that HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.… pic.twitter.com/NwzGetV1FZ
— Owen Gregorian (@OwenGregorian) April 11, 2025
So, I personally find the timing of this drama and these departures…fascinating.
We will see how this all unfolds over the next few weeks.
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It’s my understanding from other articles on this that she is not saying she can’t be fired just that she hasn’t been properly notified and will not resign.
I guess Lowell is the new Gloria Allred celebrity lawyer showing up everywhere now.
These policy differences should be ironed out *before* nomination.
I was thinking that too. Was she not properly vetted or was she dishonest during the vetting? It seems like at least one of those things has to be true.
People lie
My head hurts trying to follow this.
The guy Trump really wanted couldn’t get confirmed by the Senate. This woman was already in place working a subordinate job, so RFKJ picked her. Trump nominated her, and the Senate confirmed her… but now Trump or RFKJ or both want to fire her.
On the one hand, it’s cool to see that Trump has finally figured out how to fire problematic people promptly instead of letting them hang on to stab him in the back.
On the other, I don’t understand how this woman could have surprised either of those men with any unexpected allegiances, given that her history was well known at the time.
While we haven’t seen the level of staffing dysfunction in critical roles (CDC Director is definitely a critical role considering what we all experienced during the pandemic) that we did in his first term (four different Chiefs of Staff in three years), there is still WAY more dysfunction that would normally be expected in the first year of any administration.
Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo, the terrific Surgeon General of Florida, would have been an IDEAL pick to either be US Surgeon General or to serve in an important subordinate role, like this one. Instead, Trump’s first pick for Surgeon General (a Fox News contributor from NY) was withdrawn because she was a laughably poor choice and now we see problems at CDC. But, because Trump can be frustratingly petty, Trump refuses to include anyone connected to DeSantis in his administration. So, here we are.
IMO some of the musical chairs at CDC and other agencies under HHS is a result of the Trump WH initial attempts to be …conciliatory… may be too strong but an effort was made to reach out to the ‘big Pharma’ pro gov’t types. Remember that Trump wasn’t exactly out of step with the DC uni party/establishment during Covid. He personally castigated any politician who wasn’t in lock step with his Administration’s Covid guidance. He claimed DeSantis was risking lives by ‘opening up too early’ and went after Sweden which didn’t lock down at all. He let his Covid team run amuck and literally stood behind them during near daily televised briefings.
IOW Trump has kind of an establishment bias on healthcare but is peeved he got it wrong on Rona and his strategic acceptance/Alliance with Kennedy and the MAHA voting block was initially tempered with some mainstream nominations. The ‘oil and water’ of these divergent viewpoints just ain’t gonna mix and now the MAHA folks are pushing out the establishment types who refuse to bend.
Good points about Trump being almost perfectly aligned with the Fauci/Brix agenda. He still counts Operation Warp Speed as one of his greatest accomplishments and believes the vaccine saved the country. Maybe that’s the other reason he was unimpressed with Ladapo, one of the most vocal critics of the MRNA vaccine very early on.
To paraphrase Strother Martin, “What we’ve got here is failure to vet.”
Hmmmm, that Gold Standard bit reminds me of some research I did 30+ years ago. This was when the whole “born gay” thing was going on, and there were some research efforts to support it.
One of the big ones was by a guy named LeVay (not the Satanist) concerning some bits in the brain. In male homosexual brains these bits looked a bit like those in women’s brains. So, according to all those who reported on it, this proved they were born that way.
Going to the actual research showed all of the problems with the effort: they were mostly AIDS deaths, and there was no way to determine cause and effect, and it was a really small sample.
The thing is, the researcher actually did decent science, in that he was totally transparent about all of the issues with his bit of research. His conclusion was actually “I can’t really tell from this; maybe if we had more research from different angles, we might find an answer.” But any evidence he provided toward the answer the activists wanted was promoted, even by putting words in his mouth.
(The twins studies, OTOH, did nothing of the sort and were really horrible abuses of statistics to prove a conclusion already arrived at.)
Those bits, BTW, were the Third Interstitial Nucleus of the Anterior Hypothalamus (INAH 3).
I still remember that part all these years later. And that he had the same name as the Satanist dude.
Regardless of whether it’s a straight or gay couple there is ALWAYS a manly partner and a womanly partner in each relationship.
Gay men seem prone to being overly effeminate and lesbians overly butch.
I remember this because I was shocked that the Left wanted to go down the road of genetically mandated behaviors. “Born Gay” means genetic markers that could be identified before birth. If (cough) the political climate changes (cough) and “gayness” were to become disfavored by the general populace, well…abortion for genetic faults is … possible.
Worse, if ONE behavior (here, gayness) is found to be locked in genetically , then it seems likely that other behaviors might also be locked in. Imagine if unborn babies could be genetically tested for a propensity towards violence, theft, or psychosis? A kindergartener might be flagged for special tracking… for the rest of his or her life. Assuming that their parents or the government give them a chance for life…
Interesting, as the case of Simon Levay was one which my advisor used in his famous mantra against the Anatomist’s Creed: I’ll see it when I believe it. His work was a clear violation of the “Rule of Five,” wherein a true scientist will identify at least 5 different alternative explanations for a phenomena, and will then test each to exclude it prior to putting their explanation forth as the underlying mechanism. Coincidence does not prove causality. It was interesting how a person thought that publishing a paper would lead to celebrity and instead led to a shunning from those who mattered.
The problem with a lot of this comes from changing parameters along the way to suit a specific agenda. And also with limiting the number of parameters to only those who agree with the intended outcome. That is a one-way ticket to Lysenko brand science.
Similarly, no true scientist can support climate change as currently presented because it totally lacks scientific rigor. In Oregon they recently came up with a new term of “Severe Weather Event” which is now defined loosely as anytime it goes over 95 degrees. I think one publication even stated that this was the first ever “SWE” without acknowledging that the statement was based simply on the fact that the term hadn’t existed before even though those conditions take place pretty much every summer. Ditto mass shootings, which will soon be anytime that I mag dump at a soda can in the coast range.
LeVay actually did – in his paper, not the reports on it – propose different possibilities, though I don’t recall if it was 5. He spent a good chunk at the end of his paper spelling out all the limitations of his research in this case, and spent some effort to say “This doesn’t prove anything, except maybe a possibility that should be further explored.” He was actually a better scientist than all of the media (including science media) reported him to be.
as a civil unionized servant I have full autonomy from those that would bother me
break the public service unions /mentality and we have maga
dont…and we are defeated by lefty once again
Looks like President Trump has learned to say “You’re fired” again.
when someone is fired security usually escorts them out
when they show absolute hostility that becomes more important
She serves at the pleasure of the President. She has no case. To say she was not informed is lying.
The Fed is supposedly “independent.” Congress wrote it that way.
As to whether or not Congress can exclude Executive power in that fashion has been before SCOTUS twice, I think, with different results for different situations (and different court make-up).
Why is Abbe Lowell suddenly showing up everywhere and who is paying him?
“as a person of integrity and devoted to science, she will not resign.”
Tell me you’re not aware of the difference between “cover” and “concealment” without actually saying it.
A CDC bigshot hiding behind “science” may as well be hiding behind a grizzly.
What’s with these elitist freaks? They get fired and immediately announce they refuse to resign and will keep their post. Well, welcome to the real world nincompoops! People actually get fired here on occasion.