Centers for Disease Control Under Attack

Sep 1, 2025

Hundreds of employees of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta walked off their jobs recently for a rally to protest recent changes in the leadership of the agency. This comes after the U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. pushed for the firing of CDC Director Dr. Susan Monarez by Donald Trump, which in turn led four top leaders of the agency to resign their positions out of disgust over her removal.

During his confirmation hearings before Congress in February, RFK, Jr., a long-time vaccine skeptic, promised to “work within the current vaccine approval and safety systems” and to maintain the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) without changes. He later proceeded to fire all seventeen members of the committee in June.

Dr. Peter Marks, the top vaccine expert at the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates vaccines, resigned over his concerns about Kennedy’s pushing of false information about vaccines.

Kennedy did little to endorse measles vaccination despite the measles outbreak in Texas. He also canceled studies at the National Institutes of Health on mRNA vaccines and vaccine hesitancy, closed a network of clinics working to prevent future pandemics, placed limits on public comment opportunities in the development of new regulations, and hired David Geier, who had once been disciplined for practicing medicine without a license, to reinvestigate a link between vaccines and autism, which had already been shown to be false.

Kennedy announced on May 27 that COVID-19 vaccines would no longer be recommended for healthy pregnant women, despite research showing they are at higher risk of serious complications from COVID-19. Some women have already reported having difficulty in getting vaccines. Now the FDA issued guidelines recommending Covid vaccines only be given to seniors over 65 and those adults and children who can prove they have one serious underlying health condition. This could make it more difficult to get insurers to pay for the vaccines.

A provision of the Affordable Care Act requires insurers to cover 100% of the cost of vaccines recommended by the CDC’s ACIP. Potentially, Kennedy’s replacements on the CDC’s advisory committee could cut back on its vaccine recommendations.

Vaccinations have been proven effective over decades. Routine vaccines have been shown to have prevented over 500 million cases of illness, over 32 million hospitalizations, and over a million deaths among U.S.-born children in the thirty years from 1994 to 2023.

Dr. Monarez, the fired CDC director, the four experienced officials who resigned in support of her, and the hundreds of CDC employees who walked out have taken a principled stance against the attacks on science by Trump and RFK, Jr. It will take a much bigger fight to push back their attempts to turn back the clock to a pre-vaccine era, one in which we will have outbreaks of diseases that could easily be prevented, all so that Trump and his cohorts can lay claim to the federal budget!

Attacks on science by the government leaders in the richest country on earth are a clear indication of a capitalist system in decay. It needs to go!