A 'hostile takeover': ousted CDC official raises alarm over RFK Jr approach to infectious disease

[BumRushDaShow]

Source: The Guardian

Sat 4 Oct 2025 07.00 EDT


Robert F Kennedy Jr, the secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), has avoided meetings with top health officials, even as deadly outbreaks unfolded, and pushed to make unprecedented changes to the childhood immunization schedule, according to a recently ousted leader of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Debra Houry, the CDC’s former chief medical officer, spoke with the Guardian after testifying before a Senate committee about her eight months serving under Kennedy, offering insight into a health secretary who has been criticized as shunning expertise in favor of spreading misinformation, denigrating science, and dismantling institutions crucial for Americans’ health. Houry’s account adds to depictions from former CDC director Susan Monarez of a distant and at times explosively angry leader of the US public health system – leading Houry to call for Kennedy’s resignation.

The CDC’s priorities have changed dramatically, she pointed out. “It really represents a hostile takeover of the agency,” she said. “It gives me concern about what we can trust coming out of the overall agency as well, not just on vaccine safety.” When Tom Price became HHS secretary during Donald Trump’s first administration, he called senior agency officials to Washington DC for a two-week meeting, laying a strong foundation and staying in frequent contact. Other health leaders took a similar approach.

“In the prior Trump administration, I had briefed the secretary, I talked to the assistant secretary all the time,” Houry said. Two top HHS officials from Trump’s first administration have now offered to serve as job references after she left the CDC position without a backup plan, she said. But in the first eight months of the second Trump administration, Houry never once briefed Kennedy on any topic. She spent little time with him at all.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/04/cdc-rfk-jr-infectious-disease-testimony

[Skittles]

1. is it me

or is Trump and his entire cabinet of whoring kooks doing EVERYTHING THEY CAN to make America less safe???

[BumRushDaShow]

2. They are dismantling the whole thing piece by piece

and their cowardly lackeys in Congress are assisting, alongside the craven 6 on the Supreme Court.

This was a 40 year effort (since Gingrich), with escalation happening about a dozen years ago. I still pull this up to show where their minds were to get to this day (from 2012) -

[LetMyPeopleVote]

3. MaddowBlog-RFK Jr. adds to Team Trump's pattern of punishing whistleblowers

In the current administration, whistleblowers keep losing their jobs after speaking up. Take the NIH’s Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, for example.

It's almost as if they don't give a shit about the American people...

RFK Jr. adds to Team Trump’s pattern of punishing whistleblowers
www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddo...

#RFKDidThis #TrumpDidThis #RepublicansDidThis #GOPKakistocracy #AmericanFascistParty #Project2025 #NoRepublicansEverAgain #USPol

— Democracy Matters! (@democracymatters.bsky.social) 2025-10-03T19:09:50.217Z

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/rfk-jr-adds-team-trumps-pattern-punishing-whistleblowers-rcna235446

Earlier this year, Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, who led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, discovered that Donald Trump’s appointees were repeatedly questioning the role of vaccines in protecting health. When she raised concerns, Marrazzo was demoted.

That, however, was not the end of the dispute. The infectious diseases specialist filed a whistleblower complaint, and as The New York Times reported in a new piece, that appears to have led to her ouster. From the article:

Three weeks after a leading scientist at the National Institutes of Health filed a whistle-blower complaint against the Trump administration, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy fired her, according to her lawyer and a copy of the termination letter. ... Dr. Marrazzo said in her complaint last month that the N.I.H. had placed her on administrative leave after she objected to Trump administration actions that she said had endangered research subjects, defied court orders and undermined vaccine research.

In theory, Marrazzo might have been able to turn to the federal agency dedicated to protecting whistleblowers, but Donald Trump fired its director and gutted the office......

In theory, there’s nothing especially partisan or ideological about whistleblowers. Sometimes those who work in federal agencies will see some kind of wrongdoing — corruption, mismanagement, inefficiencies, fraud and misuse of resources, etc. — and it’s in everyone’s interest to have a system in which such witnesses are able to come forward, confident in the knowledge that they’ll be heard and respected without being punished.

In practice, that system appears to be unraveling with unnerving speed, sending a signal to federal officials: Those who speak up should expect to be punished.

[Solly Mack]

4. ...

[moniss]

5. Yes indeed a disease has taken power at HHS and CDC. One with

two arms, two legs and a rotted brain.