CDC Director Susan Monarez Ousted

Susan Monarez, Ph.D.

Just a few weeks after her Senate confirmation, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Susan Monarez, Ph.D., has been pushed out of the top job at the federal government’s public health agency.

Four other top CDC officials have resigned, according to The New York Times: Debra Houry, M.D., M.P.H., the agency’s chief medical officer; Demetre Daskalakis, M.D., M.P.H., director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases; Daniel Jernigan, M.D., M.P.H., director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious; and Jennifer Layden, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Office of Public Health Data, Science, Technology.

In his resignation letter, which he posted on X, Daskalakis said that he was “unable to serve in an environment that treats CDC as a tool to generate policies and materials that do not reflect scientific reality and are designed to hurt rather than to improve the public’s health.” He said that recent changes to the adult and children’s immunization “threaten the lives of the youngest Americans and pregnant people” and that a frequently-asked-questions document to support them cited studies that did not support the conclusions attributed to the authors.

HHS posted on its X account late yesterday afternoon that “Susan Monarez was no longer director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention” and thanked her for her service.

According to multiple media reports, that post led to a back-and-forth between her lawyers and White House spokespeople about her refusal to resign and who had the authority to fire her.

Monarez’s ouster came on the day that the FDA announced its more limited approval of three COVID-19 vaccines. According to the Washington Post, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had pushed her to endorse rescinding certain approvals related to the COVID vaccines. The newspaper also said she was pressured by Kennedy and one of his top advisers to fire her senior staff by the end of this week.

Her attorneys posted a statement yesterday evening that said Monzarez “refused to rubberstamp unscientific, reckless directives and fire dedicated health experts. She chose protecting the health over serving a political agenda. For that she was targeted.”

Monarez, a longtime government scientist, was tapped to take the top job at the CDC after the White House withdrew the nomination of its first pick, Dave Weldon, M.D., a former Republican congressman from Florida, as his prospects for getting confirmed by the Senate dimmed.

In addition to Kennedy’s disruptive vaccine skepticism, the CDC, which is headquartered in Atlanta, has been hit by staffing cuts and a shooting on Aug. 8, 2025, that killed a responding police officer. Afterward, CDC employees and others said Kennedy had villainized the CDC, and news sources reported that the shooter believed that COVID-19 vaccines made him sick. On X and elsewhere, Kennedy, his views about vaccines and criticism of the CDC have supporters who see the agency and its experts as an entrenched interest that imposed COVID-19 policies they disagree with.