Senior experts who recently resigned in protest from the top US public health agency denounced Sunday growing politicization of the organization, warning of a breakdown in the “firewall” between science and ideology.
US President Donald Trump plunged American health policy and scientific rigor deeper into crisis this past week when he fired the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Susan Monarez, after less than one month on the job.
Monarez had clashed with vaccine skeptic Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr over his vaccine policy overhaul.
Vaccines are safe and effective, according to overwhelming consensus of the scientific community, but critics say the Trump administration has gone out of its way to sow doubt, especially regarding Covid-19 vaccinations.
Monarez’s ouster triggered the departure of five other senior CDC officials, including Demetre Daskalakis as director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.
“I’ve been worried for months,” Daskalakis told the ABC News Sunday show “This Week, speaking of the impact the gutting of the historically independent CDC agency will have on public health.
“The firewall between science and ideology has completely broken down,” he said.
Daskalakis added that based on what he has seen since Trump’s January inauguration, and the packing of a critical immunization advisory committee with people who share Kennedy’s skepticism on vaccines, “they’re really moving in an ideologic direction, where they want to see the undoing of vaccination.”
Another expert who resigned in protest, doctor Debra Houry, who served as the CDC’s chief medical officer, said she knew of no agency scientist who has briefed Kennedy since he took up his post.
“I think it’s going to be very difficult to” trust the CDC moving forward, she told CNN Sunday.
As for members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) set to meet in mid-September, Houry warned it will be staffed with people who are “known to be against vaccines.”
Kennedy dismissed all members of the influential group and replaced them with his own nominees, in a move that sparked concern in Congress, even among Republicans.
Senator Bill Cassidy, a Republican who chairs the Senate health committee, has called for the indefinite postponement of the September 18 ACIP meeting due to a “lack of scientific process being followed.”
Former CDC director Tom Frieden spoke critically of the chaos at the CDC, an institution central to improving American health outcomes for more than 80 years.
“Public health is under assault,” he told CNN, pointing to Kennedy’s systematic “undermining” of vaccine infrastructure.
“They’re destroying our health protections. We are less safe.”
Another former CDC head, Richard Besser, said he worries Americans will be at “incredible risk” when the next health crisis strikes.
“With the director being removed, senior leadership leaving, I have great fears for what will happen to this country the next time we face a public health emergency” including the next pandemic, he told ABC News.
Progressive Senator Bernie Sanders, who is on the health committee with Cassidy, said in a blistering opinion piece in Sunday’s New York Times that Kennedy’s “longstanding crusade against vaccines” should disqualify him from running the Department of Health and Human Services.
Kennedy “is endangering the health of the American people now and into the future. He must resign,” Sanders wrote.
AFP
