The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been the focus of a concerted campaign to get rid of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., since the early days of the Trump administration. The tensions boiled over in the past few weeks as RFK, Jr., fired CDC Director Susan Monarez only 30 days after her appointment. The breakpoint was apparently on the issue of whether she would support Kennedy's quest to improve the health of Americans or if she would defend the monied and political interests calling the shots at the CDC. She elected to go with the status quo. When she left, four other senior CDC bureaucrats left with her, creating a media circus.
In the meantime, current and former CDC employees have been carrying out a media campaign to damage RFK. Jr. Monday, nine former CDC directors, Richard Besser (acting director for 6 months during 2009), Mandy K. Cohen (2023-2025), William Foege (1977-1983), Tom Frieden (2009-2017), Jeffrey Koplan (1998-2002), William Roper (1990-1993), David Satcher (1993-1998), Anne Schuchat (acting director for 3 months during 2018), and Rochelle P. Walensky (2021-2023) co-authored an op-ed titled: "Opinion | We Ran the CDC: RFK Jr. Is Endangering Every American’s Health - The New York Times."
The thrust of the argument is that if Kennedy doesn't keep things going the way we've always done them, then he is a very, very bad man and endangering public health.
We'll come back to that in a moment.
Another op-ed landed in the Washington Post on Wednesday, this one by Dr. Debra Houry, formerly the CDC's chief medical officer until she abruptly walked out last Thursday in solidarity with the fired director. This op-ed was designed to hit as RFK, Jr. faces a hearing before the Senate Finance Committee. It is titled "Opinion | Debra Houry on the CDC: RFK Jr. needs to answer these questions - The Washington Post."
On Thursday, the Senate Finance Committee will hear testimony from Kennedy on public health, vaccines and government accountability. The hearing is almost certain to stir controversy. But beyond the spectacle, his answers to three simple questions would tell Americans a great deal about where the country is heading.
The questions are:
- Will America be healthier?
- Will America be prepared for the next pandemic or major health threat?
- Is this the gold standard of science and transparency, or are those just slogans?
Fair enough. Those are baseline public health questions. But to credibly question someone's potential decisions, you have to examine their track record based on the same metrics.
The CDC directors who signed the NYT op-ed go back to 1977, so let's look at the record.
Death rates for diabetes related diseases have nearly tripled since 1999. Obesity rates are up 300% since 1970. The U.S. trails the rest of the developed world in any imaginable health metric. Life expectancy has regressed to 2008 levels and now trails those of other developed countries by 6 years. Since 1990, obesity has increased by 125%, diabetes by 78%, and hypertension by 3%.
Americans are living shorter and sicklier lives.
It isn't just adults. The number of children with at least one chronic health condition has increased 270% since the 1970s.
The real question is not "will America be healthier," it is "can RFK Jr.'s strategy possibly be less successful than CDC has been since 1980?" Given that he only has four years to operate, I'd say the answer to that question is a resounding "no."
The CDC once stood as the world’s most trusted guardian of public health. But bureaucracy, politicized science, and mission creep corroded its mission and destroyed public trust.
— Secretary Kennedy (@SecKennedy) September 3, 2025
My mission is clear: restore the CDC’s focus on infectious disease, drive innovation, and rebuild… pic.twitter.com/wpqB7fO5UG
Regarding preparation for the next pandemic, the real question is, can anything RFK Jr. does make us less prepared than we were for COVID? Given the performance of CDC during the COVID pandemic, I think the obvious answer is, again, "no." The CDC's failures during the COVID-19 pandemic were total and catastrophic. From gaslighting us into imagining a cloth face mask could stop a virus to school shutdowns to collaboration with the Autopen regime in censoring health information, the CDC failed in every possible way. It not only failed, but it also managed to discredit itself for a couple of generations.
As to "gold standard" science, I'm not sure CDC would recognize it if it leaped out of the tall grass and latched onto CDC's butt. Vaccines were forced onto the public without adequate testing, and adverse event reports were downplayed or ignored. How long did it take before the CDC was able to admit the vaccine was not capable of keeping Americans from catching or spreading the disease? If anything, Kennedy's initial move to keep the COVID vaccine away from infants is a huge move toward adhering to science and not Marxist politics.
CDC has failed America for decades. It has spent billions on alleged public health projects and accomplished nothing. Inarguably, America is less healthy now than it was 40 or 50 years ago. The revolving door between parts of CDC and Pharma makes its monomaniacal devotion to vaccines look much more like a grift than public service. Its insistence on treating gun violence and racism, yes, racism, as public health problems while ignoring the increase in diabetes and obesity says it is a deeply unserious organization desperately in need of reform or radical downsizing.
Under the Biden administration, we saw a deliberate attempt to use medicine and medical research as a weapon to change America’s culture and governance. Science took on the air of a fundamentalist religion where any departure from an orthodoxy, particularly regarding COVID, was met with a ferocious counterattack that, for media outlets, could result in demonetization and deletion from Google search results. Trump’s HHS leadership promises to put that era behind us. Join RedState VIP and help continue our coverage to keep you abreast of this critical struggle. Use promo code FIGHT to get 60% off your membership.
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