CDC crisis triggered by upcoming vaccine meeting, leading to director’s firing and resignations

An escalating conflict over an influential vaccine committee was one of the final straws that led to the firing of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Susan Monarez and the exodus of other highly regarded top officials.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had repeatedly undermined the agency’s independent Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, firing the committee’s members and appointing new members, including vaccine skeptics.

Early Wednesday, Monarez suggested to Dr. Richard Besser that she was going to be forced to sign off on new vaccine recommendations.

“She said there were two things she would never do in the job,” said Besser, a former acting CDC director and the CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. “One, in terms of firing her leadership who are talented civil servants like herself, and the other was to rubber-stamp ACIP recommendations that flew in the face of science.”

Hours later, Monarez was out, according to a Health and Human Services post on X. Almost immediately, several top officials resigned in protest.

One of those officials, Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, who directed the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases — which oversees vaccines — wrote in his resignation letter that a particular document related to the vaccine committee “ignored all feedback from career staff at CDC.”

The document was guidance for a newly formed work group that will present Covid vaccine data and research at the upcoming ACIP meeting — scheduled for September 18 — and contained anti-vaccine talking points. The work group will be led by newly appointed ACIP member Retsef Levi, an MIT professor who has been vocally against the mRNA Covid vaccines.

Daskalakis said in an interview that the new group members “were told that they have the ability to, quote, ‘prevent CDC bias from entering the work group.’ That’s unheard of. I don’t know what CDC bias is, because that’s not what we do. Our science is unbiased.”

Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., the chair of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee who was a key vote in Kennedy’s confirmation, said in a statement Thursday that the upcoming ACIP meeting should be postponed and called for “significant oversight.”

“Serious allegations have been made about the meeting agenda, membership, and lack of scientific process being followed for the now announced September ACIP meeting,” Cassidy said.“These decisions directly impact…