Jim O'Neill, a top deputy to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., will serve as acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an administration official told Spectrum News.
The administration wants O'Neill to replace Susan Monarez, whom the White House is trying to remove only a month after starting the job.
Monarez is fighting to keep her job. Her removal has left the nation's top public health agency reeling and three senior officials were escorted from its headquarters Thursday.
The turmoil triggered rare bipartisan alarm as Kennedy tries to advance anti-vaccine policies that are contradicted by decades of scientific research.
The chaos comes weeks before a key advisory committee, which Kennedy has reshaped with vaccine skeptics, is expected to meet to issue new recommendations on immunizations.
Two Republican senators called for congressional oversight and some Democrats said Kennedy should be fired. He is scheduled to testify on Capitol Hill on Sept. 4.
"CDC is an agency that is very troubled for a very long time," Kennedy said at an event in Texas where he talked about rural health care funding with Gov. Greg Abbott. "It's going to require getting rid of some people over the long term in order for us to change the institutional culture and bring back pride and self-esteem and make the agency the storied agency that it's always been."
Kennedy criticized the CDC website for touting abortion, water fluoridation and vaccines as the greatest medical accomplishments in history, but he declined to comment on the ouster of the agency's director, Susan Monarez.
Monarez had been on the job for less than one month when the Department of Health and Human Services announced her departure on social media Wednesday afternoon. Her lawyers then issued a statement saying the CDC director had not resigned or been told she was fired.
“When CDC Director Susan Monarez refused to rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives and fire dedicated health experts, she chose protecting the public over serving a political agenda," her attorneys, Mark Zaid and Abbe David Lowell, said in a statement. "For that, she has been targeted."
Following the lawyers’ comment, the White House said it had fired Monarez. In a statement to Politico, spokesperson Kush Desai said, “As her attorney’s statement makes abundantly clear, Susan Monarez is not aligned with the President’s agenda of Making America Healthy Again. Since Susan Monarez refused to resign despite informing HHS leadership of her intent to do so, the White House has terminated Monarez from her position with the CDC.”
The firing of Monarez led to the resignations of four other top leaders at the CDC Wednesday.
Monarez’s removal came shortly after the Food and Drug Administration said it had approved updated COVID-19 vaccines but limited who could get them. It also comes amid broader changes at the Department of Health and Human Services, where Kennedy has presided over staff cuts, including the removal of all members of a vaccine advisory panel that had advocated for mRNA vaccines for COVID-19.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Thursday also defended Monarez's firing.
"It was President Trump who was overwhelmingly re-elected on Nov. 5. This woman has never received a vote in her life, and the president has the authority to fire those who are not aligned with his mission," Leavitt said, adding that a replacement will be announced "very soon."
"The president and Secretary Kennedy are committed to restoring trust and transparency and credibility to the CDC by ensuring their leadership and their decisions are more public facing, more accountable, strengthening our public health system and restoring it to its core mission of protecting Americans from communicable diseases, investing in innovation to prevent, detect and respond to future threats," Leavitt said. "That's the mission of the CDC, and we're going to make sure that folks that are in positions of leadership there are aligned with that mission."
Prominent Democratic lawmakers, however, have condemned Monarez's firing, with at least one calling for Kennedy to be ousted.
“If there are any adults left in the White House: we cannot let RFK Jr. burn what’s left of CDC,” Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., wrote on X late Wednesday. “FIRE HIM.”
Murray is a member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.
Murray called Kennedy “a dangerous man who is determined to abuse his authority to act on truly terrifying conspiracy theories and disinformation — leaving us unprepared for the next deadly pandemic and snuffing out potential cures while he’s at it.”
Sen. Andy Kim, D-N.J., also weighed in.
“We are talking about Americans’ health and safety. Nothing is more important,” he wrote on X on Wednesday. “And yet, Trump and RFK Jr. appeared to have fired the CDC Director just weeks after she was sworn in and continue to gut a workforce of public servants trying to look out for their fellow Americans’ well-being.”
Rep. Joe Neguse, D-Colo., called the recent tumult at the CDC “a five-alarm fire” that “will have disastrous consequences for generations.”
Last week, at least 750 former and current employees of the agency published a letter saying Kennedy’s “dangerous and deceitful statements” had contributed to the killing of a police officer outside the CDC in Atlanta earlier this month. The shooter said he distrusted the COVID-19 vaccine.
The CDC leaders who resigned in the wake of Monarez's firing were Dr. Dan Jernigan, head of the agency’s National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases; Dr. Deb Houry, the agency’s deputy director; Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, head of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases; and Dr. Jennifer Layden, director of the Office of Public Health Data, Surveillance and Technology.
The officials returned to the office Thursday to collect their belongings, and staff members at the beleaguered agency had planned to gather in the afternoon to applaud them as they left the Atlanta campus. But their removal by security personnel earlier in the morning squelched those plans, according to current and former employees.
Houry and Daskalakis told The Associated Press that Monarez had tried to guard against political meddling in scientific research and health recommendations.
“We were going to see if she was able to weather the storm. And when she was not, we were done,” Houry said.
The chairman and ranking member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee suggested congressional hearings into the CDC shake-up could be imminent.
Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., the panel’s chairman, also called for Department of Health and Human Services' Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to indefinitely postpone its Sept. 18 meeting.
"Serious allegations have been made about the meeting agenda, membership, and lack of scientific process being followed for the now announced September ACIP meeting," Cassidy said in a statement. "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."
A physician, Cassidy expressed reservations about Kennedy before ultimately voting to confirm him in February.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., the ranking member on the Senate HELP Committee, called for a bipartisan congressional investigation into Monarez's firing.
"We need leaders at the CDC and HHS who are committed to improving public health and have the courage to stand up for science, not officials who have a history of spreading bogus conspiracy theories and disinformation," Sanders said in a statement.
“It’s outrageous that Sec. Kennedy is trying to fire the CDC Director — after only a few weeks on the job — for her commitment to public health & vaccines,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., the ranking member on the committee, posted on X. “The Sen. HELP Committee must hold a hearing with Kennedy & the CDC Director as soon as possible. Vaccines save lives. Period.”
However, Sen. Rand Paul, a vocal critic of the United States' COVID-19 pandemic response, including vaccines, applauded the departures.
"Good riddance to these extremists at CDC," Paul, also a member of the Senate HELP Committee, wrote on X. "There is NO medical evidence that the COVID vaccine changes transmission or health outcome for healthy children."
Former CDC Director Dr. Mandy Cohen told Spectrum News that the exodus of CDC leaders is an “unprecedented” and a “a vote of no confidence in the leadership of the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.”
“I know that they were concerned about what was going on with vaccine policy,” she said. “But it was beyond that. And they, I know, did not feel like they could any longer be part of that work.”
Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health, said she’s concerned about changes across the federal government that could impact public health.
“I am deeply worried that we have a skeleton crew at CDC,” she told Spectrum News. “And it's also not just CDC. There is a congressionally mandated Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response that is supposed to exist in the White House. … The person who was hired to be that director has since left, and my understanding is that office is not functioning. There has also been a hollowing out of the National Security Council of people who were previously responsible for and expert in monitoring for biological weapons attacks.
“So when you take all of these things together, what it spells out is the United States has basically let all of its guards down,” Nuzzo added. “And I fear very much that our adversaries are watching and looking at us as being far more vulnerable to a biological attack than we have ever been.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.