Health secretary RFK Jr. issues harsh critique of CDC after ouster of its director

Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suffers from “malaise” and questioned the importance of vaccines as a medical intervention in a television appearance Thursday, one day after he abruptly fired the CDC’s director, an appointee of President Trump, and several top officials at the agency resigned in protest, with one citing Kennedy’s “weaponization of public health.”

“There is really a deeply, deeply embedded — I would say malaise at the agency, and we need strong leadership that will go in there and that will be able to go in there and that will be able to execute on President Trump’s broad ambitions for this agency to [return] to the gold standard science and what it was when we were growing up, which was the most respected health agency in the world.”

He declined to comment specifically on the removal of the agency’s director, Susan Monarez, saying it was a personnel matter.

Kennedy’s brief critique of the CDC ranged from incontrovertible missteps by the agency, such as its failure to handle the onslaught of Covid testing at the beginning of the pandemic, to issues such as masking, where there is still scientific debate, to issues such as fluoridation, which is broadly viewed by the medical community as beneficial. He also appeared to leave key context out of his description of the list of great medical achievements on the CDC’s website.

There is a document on the CDC website that lists the 10 greatest public health achievements of the 20th century, but it’s an article in the CDC’s weekly medical journal, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, written by CDC staff and published in 1999. A second such document, covering the years 2000-2010, was published in 2011.

Neither document is currently prominently featured on the CDC website, nor does either mention abortion directly. The document covering the first decade of the 2000s does mention the advent of screening programs for inherited diseases, which can result in the termination of pregnancies but also allow early intervention for diseases that are highly treatable. The topic is mentioned as one of many advances in maternal care. Both mention fluoridation and vaccination.

The use of vaccines is widely viewed by medical authorities as a critical advance that has dramatically reduced the toll from infectious diseases. One CDC analysis stated that between 1994 and 2023, routine childhood vaccinations prevented 500 million cases of diseases including measles, pertussis, and diphtheria; prevented 40 million hospitalizationsl and 1 million deaths in the U.S. alone.

Vaccines are routinely cited as among the top medical advances and have resulted in more than a half dozen Nobel Prizes, including for the culturing of the poliovirus, the establishment of hepatitis B as a cause of liver disease and cancer, and the discovery that the human papillomavirus causes cervical cancer, as well as for the development of the mRNA technology that was used in some of the vaccines against Covid-19.