Dr. Susan Monarez,, director of the Centers for Disease Control, is refusing to leave her post after Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tried to have her removed, and a spokesperson from the White House claimed she was officially fired on Wednesday.
Monarez was just three weeks into her tenure as CDC director following a Senate confirmation when Kennedy tried to have her removed after a split over Kennedy’s controversial vaccine policies.
On Wednesday evening, a post from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on X said that Dr. Monarez was “no longer” CDC director.
“Susan Monarez is no longer director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,” the post read in part. It went on to say that Kennedy “has full confidence” in the CDC.
Following this, an email from a spokesperson for President Donald Trump, Kush Desai, said that Monarez was “not aligned” with Trump’s “agenda,” and was “terminated” by the White House, as reported by the New York Times.
Lawyers for Monarez have pushed back against these announcements. Attorney Mark Zaid called the firing “legally deficient,” as she can only be fired directly by the president. Zaid also accused Kennedy of “weaponizing public health.”
“Dr. Monarez has neither resigned nor received notification from the White House that she has been fired, and as a person of integrity devoted to science, she will not resign,” Zaid said in a statement early Thursday morning. The White House has yet to respond.
The attempted firing of Monarez follows a series of recent, high-profile departures from the CDC.
Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, who led the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, shared his resignation letter in a post to X.
“Enough is enough,” he wrote. “I am 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.”
