The campaign to pressure U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. into resigning is ramping up with the release of a letter signed by more than a thousand current and former HHS employees.
The letter claims that Sec. Kennedy is “compromising the health of the nation” and demands that he resign following last week’s ousting of Susan Monarez as Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The departure of Monarez prompted a handful of resignations of CDC leaders as well as a noisy demonstration outside the CDC offices in Atlanta.
The letter to Congress and Sec. Kennedy states:
“Should he decline to resign, we call upon the President and U.S. Congress to appoint a new Secretary of Health and Human Services, one whose qualifications and experience ensure that health policy is informed by independent and unbiased peer-reviewed science. We expect those in leadership to act when the health of Americans is at stake.”
Agency insiders have strongly opposed Kennedy’s efforts to clean up the CDC and to provide long overdue accountability for the agency’s role in pushing lockdowns, mask mandates, school and business closures and banning, firing or attempting to censor scientists and doctors that disagreed with the CDC’s Covid guidelines.
Senator Mike Lee (R-UT), in a post on X, suggested that Sec. Kennedy should be accepting letters of resignation from those who are publicly undermining their boss and President Trump’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) agenda.
Lee added, “People find ways of communicating “please fire me” without uttering those words. This is one of them.”
HHS Communications Director Andrew Nixon told The Hill, “Secretary Kennedy has been clear: the CDC has been broken for a long time. Restoring it as the world’s most trusted guardian of public health will take sustained reform and more personnel changes. From his first day in office, he pledged to check his assumptions at the door—and he asked every HHS colleague to do the same.”
Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT) has also been publicly calling for Kennedy’s resignation, accusing the HHS Secretary of denying that vaccines work.
However, Sanders has been documented to be one of the largest recipients of money from big pharma, receiving nearly $2 million in donations from vaccine makers.