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lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial
ARTICLE VIEW:
CDC staff gather to honor ‘the people that protect America’ after
leaders who resigned were escorted out of agency
By Brenda Goodman, Katherine Dillinger, CNN
Updated:
11:17 PM EDT, Thu August 28, 2025
Source: CNN
Top officials who resigned their positions at the US Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention over the ouster of the agency’s
director were escorted out of the building Thursday morning, then
celebrated and saluted by CDC staffers in the afternoon.
Before the crowds gathered outside the Atlanta headquarters, some vowed
to be the scientists’ and experts’ “loudest advocates.”
Dr. Deb Houry, the chief medical officer; Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, chief
of vaccines and respiratory diseases; Dr. Daniel Jernigan, director of
the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases; and
data chief Dr. Jennifer Layden had announced their resignations
Wednesday. Although they had already been escorted out on Thursday —
“by friends,” Houry stressed — staffers still gathered outside
the agency’s main office in Atlanta for a tribute called a “clap
out.”
“What makes CDC great are the people that make CDC up, the
scientists, everyone that makes this a family. And it’s a family that
defends our country and the health of our children and the health of
adults, whether it’s because of vaccines, whether it’s preventing
overdose, chronic disease, stopping Ebola at its source rather than
when it came to this continent,” Daskalakis told the crowd. “You
are the people that protect America, and America needs to see that you
are the people that protect America, and we are going to be your
loudest advocates.”
Dr. Daniel Pollock, who retired in 2021 after 37 years at the CDC,
called Wednesday’s events “unprecedented.”
“What’s at stake here is not only the future of Americans’ health
and well-being but the future of international health and well-being,
because so much of what the CDC develops – be it laboratory tests, be
it guidelines, be it advice about how to address a public health
problem – all of that is used throughout the world, and what’s
happening right now is, that’s being devastated,” he told CNN at
Thursday’s event. “It will be very, very hard to restore what’s
being wasted all through these absolutely unconscionable personnel
moves.”
HHS has not responded to CNN’s request for comment about the
officials who resigned.
The shakeup at the CDC comes as the Senate Committee on Finance
announced that US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy
Jr. will on September 4 about President Donald Trump’s health agenda.
Kennedy has never been briefed on measles, expert says
Kennedy has never gotten a briefing on measles, Covid-19 or flu from
CDC experts, Daskalakis said Thursday.
“No one from my center has ever briefed him on any of those
topics,” he told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins. “He’s getting
information from somewhere, but that information is not coming from CDC
experts, who really are the world’s experts in this area. … He’s
not taken us up on several offers to brief him.”
The US has had more measles cases this year than in any other year
since the disease was declared eradicated in 2000, largely because of
an outbreak that started in West Texas and primarily affected
unvaccinated people. Kennedy drew criticism during that outbreak for
promoting treatment with vitamin A and the steroid budesonide over the
measles-mumps-rubella vaccine.
HHS did not immediately respond to CNN’s request for comment on
Daskalakis’ claim.
Houry told Collins that Dr. Susan Monarez, who was ousted as the
agency’s director Wednesday, “was very committed to the CDC and
wanted to stay. I think that’s just how we all feel. We want to stay.
We believe in the mission, but when you can’t make things work,
sometimes leaving is the statement to make.”
The scientists also said Monarez’s ouster leaves it unclear who’s
really calling the shots.
“I’ve been at CDC for 30 years,” Jernigan said. “I’ve been
through multiple different administrations. We’ve been able to work
with a lot of different folks, different ideologies, but we always
focused on the science. Right now, I’m not sure, as Dr. Monarez has
had to step aside. I don’t know who actually will be making those
calls, but I do understand that when we’ve been working on these data
that we make decisions from, a lot of that is coming from the White
House, is coming from HHS. And so I don’t know exactly where we’re
going to go next, but I do know that the CDC has a mission to protect
Americans.”
Data that comes from CDC scientists can be trusted, Houry said, but she
would have concerns about anything coming from the administration that
hasn’t been reviewed or cleared by those scientists. However, she
noted, such a distinction may be difficult to spot because of
Kennedy’s “personal spin.”
In a Thursday appearance on Fox News, Kennedy said little about the
shakeup at the CDC, saying it was inappropriate to talk about
“personnel issues.”
“There’s 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 execute on President Trump’s broad ambitions for
this agency,” Kennedy said. “It may be that some people should not
be working there anymore.”
Daskalakis said that — especially in light of a shooting at this
agency’s main campus this month that left a police officer dead —
any problems start at the top.
“I think the CDC really is a place filled with great scientists and
experts,” he told Collins. “And I think that if CDC is being
characterized as troubled by Secretary Kennedy, I think we have to turn
the mirror back to him, because I think that the trouble is emanating
mainly from him. I think that the disregard for experts, the clear
statement that experts should not be trusted, really makes it seem
unlikely that his mission for CDC is to be a bastion of scientific
expertise.
“Additionally, I think that his reaction to what happened when we
were attacked really traumatized an already traumatized organization.
So I don’t think I want to call it troubled. I think that CDC has
made such progress in transforming itself after the pandemic, and that
progress is being dismantled.”
Health community reeling
Wednesday night, White House spokesperson Kush Desai said the White
House had terminated Monarez from her position.
Monarez’s attorneys, Mark Zaid and Abbe Lowell, said they rejected
the notification she received.
“Our client was notified tonight by White House staff in the
personnel office that she was fired. As a presidential appointee,
senate confirmed officer, only the president himself can fire her,”
Zaid and Lowell said in a statement. “For this reason, we reject
notification Dr. Monarez has received as legally deficient and she
remains as CDC Director. We have notified the White House Counsel of
our position.”
Deputy HHS Secretary Jim O’Neill is expected to serve as acting CDC
director, sources told CNN on Thursday.
Even as the CDC leaders prepared to say their final goodbyes to the
agency, the medical community reeled from the changes.
“Last night’s removal of CDC Director Susan Monarez and the
resignations of other CDC leaders are highly alarming at a challenging
moment for public health. This destabilization comes at a time when the
CDC’s credibility and leadership are more essential than ever,” Dr.
Bobby Mukkamala, president of the American Medical Association, said in
a statement. “The AMA is deeply concerned that this turmoil leaves us
highly susceptible to public health threats.”
“Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is
systematically dismantling the public health infrastructure that keeps
us safe from pandemics and vaccine-responsive diseases like
Covid-19,” wrote Dr. Peter Lurie, president of the Center for Science
in the Public Interest, in a statement on the departures.
CNN’s Jacqueline Howard contributed to this report.
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