OAN Staff Abril Elfi
1:43 PM – Thursday, September 4, 2025
Over 1,000 current and former employees at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) have signed a letter demanding that HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. resign from his position.
On Wednesday, the current and former employees called for his resignation while citing the recent firing of Susan Monarez, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
“We believe health policy should be based in strong, evidence-based principles rather than partisan politics. But under Secretary Kennedy’s leadership, HHS policies are placing the health of all Americans at risk, regardless of their politics,” the letter says.
“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,” the letter continues.
Nonetheless, according to a report by Fox News, HHS Communications Director Andrew Nixon brushed off the letter in a statement to the outlet.
“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. That commitment to evidence-based science is why, in just seven months, he and the HHS team have accomplished more than any health secretary in history in the fight to end the chronic disease epidemic and Make America Healthy Again,” he said.
The letter comes just days after Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) similarly called on Kennedy to resign, stating in a New York Times guest editorial that he is “endangering the health of the American people now and into the future.”
“Mr Kennedy and the rest of the Trump administration tell us, over and over, that they want to Make America Healthy Again. That’s a great slogan. I agree with it. The problem is that since coming into office, President Trump and Mr Kennedy have done exactly the opposite,” Sanders wrote.
Sanders also claimed that Kennedy ousted Monarez since she refused “to act as a rubber stamp for his dangerous policies.”
“Despite the overwhelming opposition of the medical community, Secretary Kennedy has continued his longstanding crusade against vaccines and his advocacy of conspiracy theories that have been rejected repeatedly by scientific experts,” Sanders wrote.
“Against the overwhelming body of evidence within medicine and science, what are Secretary Kennedy’s views? … He has absurdly claimed that ‘there’s no vaccine that is safe and effective’ … Who supports Secretary Kennedy’s views? Not credible scientists and doctors. One of his leading ‘experts’ that he cites to back up his bogus claims on autism and vaccines had his medical license revoked and his study retracted from the medical journal that published it.”
On Thursday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt defended the firing of Monarez, saying that Kennedy has the “authority to fire those who are not aligned with his mission.”
Additionally, reports stated that Monarez refused to approve recommendations from his newly appointed vaccine advisory panel. She claimed that this panel included members with “anti-science views,” and her refusal to comply with these directives led to her dismissal, according to Reuters. Monarez also believed that giving these individuals authority to influence policy would erode public trust in all vaccines and the CDC.
“The president and Secretary Kennedy are committed to restoring trust and transparency and credibility to the CDC by ensuring their leadership and their decisions are more public-facing, more accountable, strengthening our public health system and restoring it to its core mission of protecting Americans from communicable diseases, investing in innovation to prevent, detect, and respond to future threats,” Leavitt told reporters.
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