The CDC Implosion Continues as Staff Plan Walkout

• The CDC’s bloody Wednesday
• A public health agency in ruins

The real-time collapse of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has picked up the pace. Following the government’s attempted firing and pressuring of several senior CDC officials to step down this week, CDC staff are staging a walkout this afternoon.

The walkout, scheduled for 3 p.m. ET, is a direct response to the Trump administration’s recent meddling at the once well-respected public health agency. The staff, which will reportedly include some remaining senior officials, will also perform a “clap-out” of their leaving colleagues. The Associated Press is hosting a live stream of the event, which you can watch below.

Among the departures is CDC director Susan Monarez, who has alleged she was targeted for not supporting the administration’s “unscientific” agenda.

The CDC’s bloody Wednesday

The ongoing chaos at the CDC reached its breaking point Wednesday.

The Washington Post reported in the afternoon that Monarez was being ousted just four weeks into taking over the role, a decision later announced by HHS on its X page. Over the next few hours, four senior staff members, including the CDC’s chief medical officer Debra Houry, turned in their resignation notice. Some of the members posted their resignation letters online, including Demetre Daskalakis, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.

In his letter, Daskalsis stated that he was unable “to serve in an environment that treats CDC as a tool to generate policies and materials that do not reflect scientific reality and are designed to hurt rather than to improve the public’s health.” He specifically singled out RFK Jr.’s unilateral purging of the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel and the CDC’s revoked endorsement of covid-19 vaccines for healthy children and pregnant women as examples of this harm.

This fallout only grew messier as the night went on. Lawyers speaking on Monarez’s behalf claimed that, despite the HHS announcement, she had neither been fired nor resigned from her role, as she could only be fired by President Donald Trump directly. They also stated that Monarez was pressured to fire several staff members, which may have included the four officials who resigned of their own accord.

“When CDC director Susan Monarez refused to rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives and fire dedicated health experts, she chose protecting the public over serving a political agenda,” Mark S. Zaid, one of the two attorneys representing Monarez, said in a statement posted to social media.

Though the actual legal status of Monarez’s employment remains murky, the Trump administration is acting as though she’s no longer around. At a press briefing this afternoon, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt stated that “the president has the authority to fire those who are not aligned with his mission.”

A public health agency in ruins

Dramatic as these developments have been, the CDC’s implosion shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise.

Almost immediately into his second term, and on the advice of Elon Musk’s DOGE, Trump implemented widespread job and funding cuts at the CDC and other public health agencies. And we’re still learning about the many ramifications of this gutting. Just this week, NBC News reported that the CDC’s foodborne illness surveillance program dramatically scaled back its operations nearly two months ago and is now only regularly monitoring two of the eight foodborne germs it was previously tracking.

Meanwhile, HHS is now being led by RFK Jr., a longtime vaccine skeptic who’s seemingly never met a conspiracy theory he didn’t like. Since taking over HHS, Kennedy has promised to take on fictional chemtrails while shelving or restricting perfectly safe vaccines at the behest of the anti-vaccination movement.

From all appearances, Monarez and the other resigning CDC members have tried to hold back the worst aspects of this quack agenda. But now that they’re gone or likely out of the door, it’s frightening to think that our country’s public health hasn’t come close to reaching rock bottom yet.