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By Julie Steenhuysen and Dan Levine
(Reuters) -CDC Director Susan Monarez was fired on Wednesday after resisting changes to vaccine policy that were advanced by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and that she believed contradicted scientific evidence, a close associate said on Thursday.
The revelation and interviews with top officials who resigned in the wake of the director's firing underscored the growing division over the U.S. approach to public health and the upheaval at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which protects U.S. health and has played a global role in eradicating smallpox, reducing polio, and controlling HIV/AIDS.
Fellow CDC employees cheered the three departing officials as they left the Atlanta campus on Thursday in a show of defiance toward Kennedy and his unscientific claims about vaccines.
Richard Besser, former acting director of the CDC, told reporters that he spoke with Monarez on Wednesday.
"She said that there were two things she would never do in the job. One was anything that was deemed illegal, and the second was anything that she felt flew in the face of science, and she said she was asked to do both of those," Besser said. He added that Monarez refused to dismiss her leadership team without cause.
The three top CDC officials who quit after Monarez's dismissal told Reuters on Thursday they too had resigned over anti-vaccine policies and misinformation pushed by Kennedy and his team.
Kennedy has made sweeping changes to vaccine policies since taking office this year, including firing its entire expert vaccine advisory panel and replacing them with like-minded anti-vaccine activists and other hand-picked advisers.
The White House named Jim O’Neill, currently deputy secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, as interim leader of the CDC, an administration official said.
"(Monarez) was not aligned with the president's mission to Make America Healthy Again, and the secretary asked her to resign. She said she would, and then she said she wouldn't, so the president fired her," White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said on Thursday.
ESCORTED OFF CAMPUS
The trio of departed officials - Chief Medical Officer Debra Houry, National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases Director Demetre Daskalakis and National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases Director Daniel Jernigan - were escorted from the CDC's Atlanta headquarters campus on Thursday, according to four sources familiar with the situation.
CDC staffers, many wearing green shirts and ribbons as a symbol of support for public health scientists, clapped, hugged and cheered them outside the gates. The site was just steps away from where a gunman had sprayed hundreds of rounds of bullets into the building on August 8, killing a police officer before turning the gun on himself.
Houry and Daskalakis cited a rise in health misinformation, particularly on vaccines, attacks on science, the weaponization of public health, and attempts to cut the agency's budget in their resignation letters reviewed by Reuters.
"I'm a doctor. I took the Hippocratic oath that said, 'First, do no harm.' I believe harm is going to happen, and so I can't be a part of it," Daskalakis said in an interview.
HHS did not respond to a request for comment.
Since taking office in January, Trump has wrested control over U.S. government agencies long seen as independent from presidential politics as they oversee such matters as elections, stock markets and labor unrest. Monarez is one of at least three Senate-confirmed regulatory officials Trump has moved to fire in recent days, including Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook and Surface Transportation Board member Robert Primus.
Kennedy declined to comment during a Thursday interview on the specifics of the departures.
"The agency is in trouble, and we need to fix it and we are fixing it. And it may be that some people should not be working there anymore," he told Fox News' "Fox and Friends" program.
Besser said Kennedy insisted Monarez accept all of the revamped vaccine committee's future recommendations. The CDC director traditionally has the final say on vaccine policy and can accept or reject committee recommendations.
The CDC has been heavily criticized by health experts in recent months for dropping its recommendation that pregnant women be vaccinated against COVID and for narrowing its backing of the shots for children with health complications.
During her confirmation hearing, Monarez said she has not seen evidence linking vaccines and autism, a view that aligns with accepted science but not with Kennedy.
Since taking the job, Kennedy has made false and unscientific claims about vaccines including that the measles vaccine contains cells from aborted fetuses and the mumps vaccination does not work.
Kennedy launched a department-wide effort to investigate the rise in autism rates among children in the U.S., which he has said, without any scientific evidence, is due to "environmental toxins."
(Reporting by Julie Steenhuysen in Chicago and Dan Levine in San Francisco; Additional reporting by Susan Heavey, David Thomas, Trevor Hunnicutt, James Oliphant, Leah Douglas and Ahmed Aboulenein in Washington and Michael Erman in New York; Writing by Costas Pitas and Daniel Trotta; Editing by Caroline Humer, Chizu Nomiyama, Nick Zieminski and Bill Berkrot)
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