MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
OK, let's catch up with what is happening at the CDC. We know that this week, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told the new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to resign. We know Susan Monarez refused, according to her attorneys. Now the White House says she has been fired. Some of the CDC's top career scientists have resigned in protest. And this afternoon, CDC staff gathered outside headquarters in Atlanta to honor their service.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Thank You.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Thank you so much. Thanks for coming out. Thank you.
KELLY: NPR's Selena Simmons-Duffin is on this story. Hey, Selena.
SELENA SIMMONS-DUFFIN, BYLINE: Hi, Mary Louise.
KELLY: So tell me about these senior leaders, what we know about the staff showing them support there today.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Yeah, so the group being honored this afternoon included three high-level scientists who've worked in public health for decades. I've heard them described as the backbone of the agency. They say they coordinated their resignations to draw attention to political interference in CDC's science. Now, staff had planned to clap them out as they left CDC today, but security personnel escorted them out in the morning instead. Staff gathered anyway, and the leaders walked down a sidewalk with people lining up to cheer them. There were signs and chants.
And all of this took place at a pharmacy across the street from CDC campus, which is striking because earlier this month, that pharmacy is where a gunman stood to shoot hundreds of bullets into CDC, killing a police officer. Investigators say he was motivated by vaccine distrust, and some of the CDC buildings still have bullet holes in them.
KELLY: Wow, what an image of things unfolding in Atlanta today. You said, Selena, that these departing scientists coordinated their resignation to draw attention to political interference. Can you be more specific?
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Yeah, it really seems like a big part of the dispute here was over vaccine policy. So Secretary Kennedy promised senators he was not going to make radical changes to federal vaccine policy given his background in anti-vaccine activism. But that is really what he has done. He fired all 17 members of an outside expert vaccine panel and replaced them with his own hand-picked roster. And he changed COVID-19 vaccine recommendations without input from his own expert staff.
And it sounds like what happened here is that CDC Director Monarez was told to rubber-stamp vaccine recommendations from Kennedy's panel, and she refused. She was also told to fire her senior team by Kennedy, and she refused. This is according to her lawyers and Richard Besser, CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, who spoke to Monarez yesterday and briefed reporters.
KELLY: OK.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: When HHS announced that Monarez was out, these leaders submitted their resignations. It is not clear if they are exactly the same people that HHS was trying to fire or not.
KELLY: Well, what else does HHS say? What's their official response to all this?
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Secretary Kennedy was on "Fox & Friends" this morning. He was asked about some of these accusations. He said he couldn't comment on Monarez specifically because it was a personnel matter. He also said there was a, quote, "deeply embedded malaise at the agency." And he also said this about the senior leaders who resigned.
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ROBERT F KENNEDY JR: No, it has not caught us by surprise. Again, I cannot comment on personnel issues. But 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.
KELLY: But, Selena, what happens now at CDC and beyond - all these top leadership gone?
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: We are about to find out. I mean, we're in uncharted waters right now. The CDC is the agency in charge of emergency preparedness and response, and public health leaders across the country are just really hoping there is no public health emergency right now with the CDC in such disarray. And there is some discussion happening about logistically how public health works without CDC. You know, the truth is there's no replacement for the federal government, not just in terms of resources, but in terms of legal authority. But I do think philanthropies will try to fill some gaps, so will state and local health departments. We will just have to wait and see how all of this shakes out.
KELLY: NPR's Selena Simmons-Duffin, thanks.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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