The firing of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Dr. Susan Monarez, less than a month after she was confirmed by the United States Senate, should worry those who care about public health and American science.

But the move should not be a surprise. It comes at the end of a tumultuous summer that included budget cuts, firings and resignations, a shooting near the agency’s headquarters and a raft of bewildering changes to process and protocol. And while it may well signal an alarming new turn in the steady dismantling of American public health, that demolition was already well underway.

An official statement from the White House said that Dr. Monarez was “not aligned with the president’s agenda of Making America Healthy Again.” News reports indicate that it was her clashes with the health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., over vaccine policy that did her in.

In his confirmation hearings, Mr. Kennedy insisted that he was not an anti-vaxxer and that he just wanted to set the highest possible bar for which studies were used to inform health policy. He wanted “gold standard science,” he said. He also took pains to reassure his interlocutors that he was comfortable with being challenged, and with accepting data that contradicted his own views.

In the weeks that followed, some onlookers breathed a sigh of relief as Dr. Marty Makary, a surgeon, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a medical doctor and health economist, were appointed to lead the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health. If their views on Covid-19 had been deemed controversial, these were still men of science and medicine. Surely that ethos would prevail, the thinking went, and would temper some of the more bombastic instincts that seemed to govern the health secretary.

But it’s clear now that neither leader was appointed for his credentials so much as his willingness to flout the basic principles of sound science and good public health. Dr. Bhattacharya has defended the termination of mRNA research; Dr. Makary has allowed officials to override his agency’s scientists on vaccine approval decisions. Neither leader has raised any meaningful objection to the broader dismantling of the agency he has been put in charge of. And when Dr. Monarez, their C.D.C. counterpart, stood her ground, she was fired.