Top CDC Officials Say They’d Think Twice About Trusting Public Health Info From RFK Jr.’s HHS

Three top officials who resigned this week from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in protest after the ouster of Director Susan Monarez said Thursday night that they would think twice about trusting public health information put out by the Trump administration.

“If it’s coming from CDC scientists, you can trust it. If it’s coming from the administration and hasn’t been cleared by CDC scientists, or reviewed by them, then I would have concerns,” Debra Houry, the CDC’s chief medical officer and deputy director for program and science, said during a joint interview Thursday evening on CNN.

The three medical professionals who spoke with the network’s Kaitlan Collins include Houry, Demetre Daskalakis, the former director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, and Daniel Jernigan, the former director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Disease. They all sent in their resignations Wednesday after Trump fired Monarez.

All agreed they had seen evidence of interference with scientific materials compiled or distributed by the CDC, and noted several instances in which they felt Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. shared misleading information on crucial public health topics.

“There is public evidence of the intent to interfere with the science of the CDC,” Daskalakis told Collins, citing the release of public documents from the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Kennedy earlier this year fired the entire panel’s membership, and later appointed several anti-vaccine voices in their place.

Kennedy also barred public health professionals and infectious disease experts from advising the panel, characterizing them as biased “based on their constituency and/or population that they represent.”

“CDC does not have bias,” Daskalakis said Thursday after noting the change in policy. “On the contrary, the people that have been installed by Secretary Kennedy are full of ideology and bias that will actually contaminate the science.”

Earlier on Thursday, the Trump administration selected Jim O’Neill, the deputy secretary of health and human services, to take over leadership of the CDC.

He is a biotech investor and former CEO of the Thiel Foundation, founded by Trump donor and investor Peter Thiel.

O’Neill also worked at HHS under President George W. Bush, where he opposed expanding regulation by the Food and Drug Administration regarding hospital laboratory tests.

Speaking at a news conference in Texas on Thursday to tout his “Make America Healthy Again” platform, Kennedy called the CDC “very troubled,” a claim Daskalakis said should be turned back on the secretary.

“I think we have to turn the mirror back to him because I think that the trouble is emanating mainly from him,” Daskalakis said on CNN. “I think that the disregard for experts, the clear statement that experts should not be trusted, really makes it seem unlikely that his mission for CDC is to be a bastion of scientific expertise.”