Topline
The White House selected Health and Human Services Deputy Secretary Jim O’Neill as the next acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to The Washington Post, tapping the technology investor for the role as former CDC leadership protested against the Trump administration and its contested firing of ex-CDC Director Susan Monarez.
O’Neill has been tapped to take over as the acting director of the CDC, the Post reported, citing two unnamed sources familiar with the decision who said O’Neill would maintain his role as HHS deputy secretary.
Hundreds of staffers and protesters demonstrated outside the CDC’s Atlanta headquarters Thursday afternoon for at least an hour.
Daniel Jernigan, director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, is one of multiple CDC leaders who resigned from the agency this week, and said Thursday’s walkout was to “get the politics out of public health” and “let the science lead us, because that’s how we get to the best decisions for public health.”
Jernigan resigned from the CDC this week alongside the agency’s chief medical officer, Debra Houry, and Demetre Daskalakis, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.
Houry said her and CDC leadership “reached a tipping point,” calling out HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s promotion of “vitamins over vaccines” and saying “we knew it was a powerful statement for the three of us to do this together.”
Protesters also took issue with the ouster of Monarez, whose lawyers have rejected the White House’s termination of the director, arguing as a “presidential appointee, senate confirmed officer, only the president himself can fire her.”
Houry noted the “devastation that’s happening to our staff, our campus, the programs,” telling staffers “we won’t forget you, we’re just now going to really advocate for the great work you all do.”
The walkout follows a shooting earlier this month at the CDC’s headquarters, where a gunman fired hundreds of bullets at the building in an attack that left a Dekalb County police officer dead.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.