Tuesday’s scheduled all-hands meeting at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would have been the first during the new Trump administration. Instead, after it was canceled at the last minute, dozens of current and former employees at the country’s leading public health agency rallied outside CDC headquarters in Atlanta to protest what they described as a wave of unlawful firings, the dismantling of lifesaving programs and the censorship of science.
Amid the roar of cowbells and car horns, protesters held colorful signs with sharp messages, including “Save CDC,” “RFK’s War on Kids” and “Who the f— is in charge?” The protest was spurred by staff cuts over the past several months that gutted departments amid a senior leadership vacuum at the agency, which still has no director. Many protesters called for the appointment of a new CDC director and the resignation of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who oversees the CDC.
“I am here today to tell you that the secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has shown himself to be a domestic health threat,” said Dr. Anna Yousaf, an infectious disease researcher at the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.
“These attacks against scientific standards and well-established processes culminated yesterday when Secretary Kennedy announced that he is firing all of the members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP,” Yousaf continued, eliciting “boos” from the crowd.
Kennedy announced Monday that he was removing all 17 members of the independent vaccine advisory panel. Months earlier, he oversaw a massive restructuring of federal health departments that included laying off 2,400 CDC employees and dismantling many agency programs.
Many CDC staff members had looked forward to Tuesday’s all-hands meeting as a place to air their concerns, but on Monday morning, Matthew Buzzelli, the CDC’s chief of staff and most senior acting leader, sent an email to senior CDC officials canceling the agencywide meeting.
While Buzzelli explained that the meeting was being rescheduled to review several in-process leadership updates, some CDC employees saw the move as another way to evade transparency. In a call to action distributed among current, fired and retired CDC employees, a group calling itself the Save CDC Campaign wrote that Buzzelli had “avoided our questions, dismissed our concerns, and ignored the collective grief we share for the agency, colleagues, and programs we have lost.”
Andrew Nixon, the HHS spokesperson, declined to comment on the protest and the employees’ concerns.
A sense of rudderlessness inside the CDC has deepened in recent months, staff members said. The agency has been without a director since President Donald Trump returned to office.
“We need to know who is in charge of the CDC. We need to know who is making decisions,” said Kathleen Ethier, who directed the CDC’s Division of Adolescent and School Health until January.
CDC Director Mandy Cohen, a medical doctor, stepped down on Jan. 20 when Trump was inaugurated, as is customary. Shortly afterward, Susan Monarez, a microbiologist without a medical degree, was named acting director, awaiting the confirmation of Trump’s pick to lead the agency, Dr. Dave Weldon, a former congressman. Then, in March, Trump abruptly withdrew Weldon’s nomination, which Weldon attributed to renewed scrutiny of his past ties to anti-vaccine activists and discredited researchers.
By the end of that month, when Trump announced Monarez as his new nominee for director, roughly a third of the CDC’s senior managers had left their posts. Since then, Monarez has been absent from day-to-day operations, because of rules in the Vacancies Act that bar nominees from serving as acting directors of the agencies they’ve been tapped to lead.
It’s unclear when Monarez’s confirmation might proceed. Her nomination hearing before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, chaired by Bill Cassidy R-La., hasn’t been scheduled — reportedly because she has yet to submit the required paperwork.
In her absence, Kennedy handed operational control to Buzzelli, a former federal prosecutor with no public health background. A Democratic lawmaker wrote that Buzzelli was “both unqualified and legally ineligible to act as Acting Director of the CDC in any capacity.”
A current CDC official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity without authorization to speak to the media, said the absence of a director leaves the agency without an important check and balance.
“The perception is that there is no buffer at CDC to protect it from what RFK Jr. wants to do,” the official said. “The center directors are trying to fill the void but are in the dark. It does not feel like there is any venue to express opinions about the agency. So the only outlet is protest.”
Nixon, the HHS spokesperson, defended Buzzelli’s role in a text message. “The CDC Chief of Staff has been carrying out some of the duties of the CDC Director as the Senior Official, as necessary, and is surrounded by highly qualified medical professionals and advisors to help fulfill these duties as appropriate,” he wrote.
Nixon said in April that Buzzelli would review vaccine recommendations made by ACIP, the group of independent advisers whom Kennedy fired Monday. But after ACIP’s April meeting, weeks passed and no recommendations were approved.
In May, Kennedy stepped in and signed off on three recommendations for Chikungunya vaccines for travelers and lab workers. But based on the CDC website, Kennedy has yet to approve two other ACIP recommendations — one for a meningococcal vaccine for certain teens and another for an RSV vaccine for high-risk adults in their 50s.
ACIP is composed of pediatricians, geriatricians and other vaccine experts who volunteer to meet three times a year to analyze the latest data on safety and efficacy of vaccines, including newly approved inoculations and new data about existing vaccines. The group offers recommendations to the CDC about vaccine approvals, and while the CDC isn’t required to follow the advice, it often does. The CDC’s decisions about vaccines play an important role in which shots are required to enter public school and are made available to children for free.
Kennedy, in firing the existing members, claimed they were plagued by conflicts of interest due to having received funding from pharmaceutical companies. ACIP members go through a rigorous vetting process before they are appointed and are required to disclose conflicts and recuse themselves from voting on those vaccines.
The next ACIP meeting is scheduled for June 25-27. Kennedy said on X Tuesday evening that he would appoint new members in “the coming days” and that they would “highly credentialed physicians and scientists” and not “ideological anti-vaxxers.” Kennedy has faced criticism for his anti-vaccine activism, which includes founding the country’s largest anti-vaccine nonprofit.
Former acting CDC Director Richard Besser, who is also the president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a health-focused nonprofit organization, said he hopes the meeting won’t happen as planned.
“I don’t see getting 17 members to be vetted appropriately in that short a period of time,” Besser said.
