Jim O’Neill is the new acting director of the CDC. Here, HHS secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., jurors as assistant secretary of HHS on June 9. O’Neill will play the two roles.
Amy Rossetti / Department of Health and Human Services via AP
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Amy Rossetti / Department of Health and Human Services via AP
It makes a week of agitation to the centers for Disease Control and Prevention. For employees of the Public Health Agency whose head office is based in Atlanta, the first idea that something did not come on Monday when a meeting planned for staff was canceled.
Here’s how the events took place from there.
1. The CDC director Susan Monarez is out.
CDC director Susan Monarez directed the agency for less than a month. It was confirmed by the Senate at the end of July, sworn on July 31, led the agency by attacking a shooter on August 8 and was forced to leave the post this week.
His lawyers, Mark Zaid and Abbe Lowell, said in a press release that it was targeted because it “refused to stadium non -scientific rubber, reckless directives and health experts dedicated to fire”.
Sources that were not allowed to speak publicly on the issue told NPR that Monarez had a meeting that went very badly last week with the secretary of health and social services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who launched the drama that took place this week.
The Washington Post has broken the story, then HHS confirmed that Monarez was out In an article on social networks on the agency’s X flow. Later, the press secretary of the White House, Karoline Leavitt, said that she had been dismissed.
Monarez lawyers Say that the dismissal was not communicated To her by President Trump, and this is necessary because it is a position confirmed by the Senate.
2. Meet the acting director of the CDC, Jim O’Neill.
Kennedy typed one of his best advisers to be an acting director of the CDC. Jim O’Neill will continue In his role in HHSwhile directing the CDC. Kennedy announced this decision Thursday in an email to the staff obtained by NPR.
O’Neill previously played various roles in HHS under President George W. Bush. Since then, he mainly directs investment funds for the technological investor billionaire Peter Thiel. He had a Senate audience for his current role in HHS.
O’Neill was a supporter of the first supporters of the Make America Healthy Again movement in Kennedy and a vocal critic on the social media of the role of the CDC during the Pandemic. Its handful of social media on X is @HHS_JIM.
In the past, he has expressed very strong libertarian opinions. For example, he said he thought that people should be able to be compensated for giving human organs to help encourage more supply. He argued this point in a speech has The Seasonading Institute In 2009: “Eleven people each day die while waiting for a kidney who could save their lives. And there are a lot of healthy arrangements that walk, unused.”
It should be noted that he is not a doctor or a scientist. Monarez, who has occupied other roles in the government, has a doctorate in microbiology, and most CDC directors have obtained medicine diplomas. The history of O’Neill concern Dr. Deb Houry, the CDC chief doctor who resigned this week.
“You can be an excellent administrator, but you must at least have knowledge of how you manage an emerging epidemic or pathogen,” Homey told NPR.
HHS did not immediately respond to the request for NPR comments.
The employees and supporters of the CDC gathered outside the agency’s headquarters in Atlanta on Thursday to come together to support three leaders who resigned to protest against the dismissal of CDC director Susan Monarez.
Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images
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3. More CDC chiefs have resigned to protest.
Besides Houry, two other senior CDC managers resigned this week. Dr. Demetre Daskalakis directed the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, and Dr. Dan Jernigan led the National Center for emerging and zoonotic infectious diseases.
Houry says he became clear very quickly after Monarez was sworn in that she was not going to be able to implement his ideas for vaccines.
A key problem for Houry, Daskalakis and Jernigan are the actions that Kennedy has taken that align with the views of anti-scientific activists. Houry told NPR that the ethics that they could not respect the management of the agency, and she said that they wanted to time their starts for impact after the news announced that Monarez was dismissed.
“We said,” Ok, it’s our time “”, says Houry. “And we decided to do it together because when only one senior official leaves, you know, it becomes a small blip. But for us, we care about the agency and the people. And that is how we could make this strong declaration.”
4. Basic CDC employees crossed the essayuse.
On August 8, a shooter pulled more than 500 rounds of ammunition in the CDC buildings and killed the police officer of the county of Dekalb, David Rose. The shooter was motivated by the “dissatisfaction” with the mRNA vaccine and died by a self-inflicted ball injury, The authorities said. The incident occurred after Kennedy’s action on August 6, suspending $ 500 million in mRNA research grants.
The shooter’s attack also came to the heels of a chaotic and confusing layoff process at the CDC, and a radical change in the philosophical direction so that the agency focuses only on infectious diseases. Kennedy reiterated this change of direction in an email to all CDC staff obtained by NPR.
Although infectious diseases have always been a priority for the agency, the CDC has also tried to alleviate other things that kill Americans, such as injuries and chronic diseases. Kennedy changes this without clear explanation of how the federal health infrastructure will tackle these problems in the future.
5. The eyes are then on the congress.
THE Senate help The committee gave Monarez its audience, and this committee is chaired by the republican senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana.
Cassidy is a doctor who talked about his personal experiences by seeing devastating diseases that can arrive at children who are not vaccinated during Kennedy’s confirmation hearing. He said he had voted to confirm Kennedy after Kennedy had promised to maintain federal vaccination policies – which is not what Kennedy did.
Cassidy said this week that his committee would monitor these CDC resignations. The classification democrat of the same committee, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, called for an audience on the reshuffle of leaders. Cassidy has not yet confirmed if it will happen.
Cassidy, however, called for an important meeting on vaccines to be postponed. The Vaccination Practices Advisory Committee, known as ACIP, announced Thursday that its fall meeting would be from September 18 to 19. Cassidy asked that it was pushed back.
Kennedy dismissed all members of the ACIPS Committee and replaced them with his own list of people who do not have the same expertise as the licensed panel.
Gisele Grayson contributed to this report.
