A group of former leaders of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who served under both Democratic and Republican presidents blasted Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for his latest actions targeting the agency, declaring that Americans deserve a health secretary who “supports science and has their back.”
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In a New York Times opinion piece titled “We Ran the C.D.C.: Kennedy Is Endangering Every American’s Health” published Monday, nine former officials, who served as directors or acting directors of the agency, warned that the situation facing the CDC is unprecedented.
What Kennedy “has done to the C.D.C. and to our nation’s public health system over the past several months — culminating in his decision to fire Dr. Susan Monarez as C.D.C. director days ago — is unlike anything we have ever seen at the agency, and unlike anything our country has ever experienced,” they write.
Jacquelyn Martin/File/AP Photo
The authors of the piece include William Foege, William Roper, David Satcher, Jeffrey Koplan, Richard Besser, Tom Frieden, Anne Schuchat, Rochelle Walensky and Mandy Cohen.
The Trump administration terminated Monarez last week, less than a month since she took up the position, after she refused to resign. Her lawyers said she was targeted for refusing to “rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives and fire dedicated health experts.” At least four other CDC officials also left the agency last week.
The decision to fire Monarez on top of Kennedy’s call to terminate thousands of federal workers from his department as well as to play down the role of vaccines in fighting the ongoing measles outbreak in the country, among other things, will have a detrimental impact on the country’s health security, the ex-CDC leaders wrote in the Times.
“Residents of rural communities and people with disabilities will have even more limited access to health care. Families with low incomes who rely most heavily on community health clinics and support from state and local health departments will have fewer resources available to them. Children risk losing access to lifesaving vaccines because of the cost,” they said.
“This is unacceptable, and it should alarm every American, regardless of political leanings,” they added.
The group said that while disagreements with leadership may have existed during their service, former health secretaries “never gave us reason to doubt that they would rely on data-driven insights for our protection, or that they would support public health workers.”
“The current H.H.S. leadership, however, operates under a very different set of rules,” they added.
While the authors conceded that the CDC is not perfect, they argued it plays a central role in keeping Americans healthy.
The people who join the agency “have done so not for prestige or power, but because they believe deeply in the call to service,” they said.
“They deserve an H.H.S. secretary who stands up for health, supports science and has their back. So, too, does our country.”
Read the full opinion piece in The New York Times.