Closing summary
This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration, a rare day in which Donald Trump himself has been absent from view as chaos descended at the nation’s leading public health agency. We will be back on Friday but in the meantime, here’s latest:
The White House confirmed that the deputy health secretary, Jim O’Neill, a biotech investor and former speechwriter, will serve as acting CDC director until a Senate-confirmed replacement for the ousted Susan Monarez is in place.
Hundreds of staffers rallied outside the CDC headquarters in Atlanta to support vaccine research and the public health leaders who resigned or were fired by the Trump administration. Three of the senior leaders who resigned, Debra Houry, Demetre Daskalakis and Daniel Jernigan, spoke to the crowd.
Houry, who served as chief medical officer and deputy director for program and science at the CDC, said that she, Daskalakis and Jernigan agreed to leave together because of their work on vaccine science and outbreaks. “We have reached the tipping point and we knew it was a powerful statement for the three of us to do this together,” Houry said.
Jernigan, one of the three CDC leaders to resign in protest on Wednesday, said that the last straw for him was being forced to re-examine the false claim that vaccines cause autism, as part of an effort by Robert F Kennedy Jr, the anti-vaccine health secretary, to find a link to autism.
Senator Bill Cassidy, a physician who chairs the Senate’s health, education, labor and pensions committee, called for a vaccine advisory panel to indefinitely postpone its scheduled September meeting. “If the meeting proceeds, any recommendations made should be rejected as lacking legitimacy given the seriousness of the allegations and the current turmoil in CDC leadership,” the senator said.
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RFK Jr's push to link vaccines to autism helped convince CDC leaders to resign
In interviews on Thursday with Reuters and the Washington Post, Dr Daniel Jernigan, one of the three CDC leaders to resign in protest on Wednesday, said that the last straw for him was being forced to re-examine the false claim that vaccines cause autism.
The health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, promised “announcements” in September on what has caused a spike in autism at a cabinet meeting on Tuesday.
Jernigan, whose department oversaw the vaccine safety group, said that he was “asked to revise and to review and change studies” about vaccine safety data by Kennedy’s aides, Lyn Redwood and David Geier, anti-vaccine activists who promote a debunked link with autism.
Redwood, former leader of the Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine group founded by Kennedy that has featured the parents of a Texas girl who died of measles in its campaign against the MMR vaccine, is listed as an expert and Geier as a senior data analyst in the health department employee database.
Jernigan said a request for Geier to be given access to vaccine safety data prompted him to raise patient privacy and ethical concerns with senior officials in the health department.
“I was told was that the requests were legally supported and that that was enough. But for me, that’s just not enough,” Jernigan said. “I have come to that point where I’m not able to fulfil the duties that I have as a public health professional.”
Dr Debra Houry, who resigned as the CDC’s chief medical officer, said she and her colleagues had become aware that vaccine advisers appointed by Kennedy, a longtime critic of vaccines, were making recommendations before reviewing data.
“For us, that’s problematic,” Houry said in an interview with Reuters. “As scientists, you should never know in advance what you want the data to show.”
Dr Demetre Daskalakis, who stepped down as the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases on Wednesday, said that he believes the goal of Kennedy and his close advisers is “to create chaos and more mistrust of vaccines, so that there is less demand for vaccines, and then over time, they can demonstrate that there’s less need” for federal vaccine subsidies.
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