Related Articles
Earlier this week, staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention received a message from the higher-ups, vaguely informing them of an “obscene” placard and some “vandalism” on government property.
“We received a report of vandalism on Roybal Building 18, where an obscene sign was placed in the window,” the alert reads, per a copy reviewed by Rolling Stone. “We are investigating this incident and want to remind staff that vandalism of any kind will result in disciplinary action.”
The notice and warning came just before President Donald Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. set off another round of tumult at the CDC over the attempted ouster of Director Susan Monarez, and the rewriting of vaccine policies. On Thursday, hundreds of CDC employees staged a walk out at the agency’s Atlanta offices in support of four senior staff who resigned in protest of Kennedy’s reforms and the administration’s attempt to remove Monarez.
It was not immediately clear to some recipients of this email what the “obscene” sign was, but multiple former and current government personnel shared with this magazine photos of a highly visible, apparently hand-written “FUCK RFK” sign that sources say appeared recently on that building.
Matters only degenerated from there. As this work week came to a close, former and current CDC staff assured Rolling Stone that the internal rank-and-file animus toward the president, Kennedy, and their allies in the federal government has only intensified in recent days. Some staffers are actively plotting their escape strategies, and how best to give RFK Jr. the middle finger (figuratively or literally) on the way out the door. Meanwhile, a senior Trump administration official adds that the CDC and other agencies will continue to aggressively investigate, and punish, the ongoing “mischief” and so-called “deep state activity” that Team Trump expects to flare up again, and that such actions “won’t be tolerated.”
The Trump administration is currently attempting to remove Monarez, a career microbiologist and infectious disease expert, from her position as head of the CDC. According to a Thursday report from The New York Times, the move to fire Monarez came after she refused to endorse Kennedy’s plan to restrict public access and narrow recommendation guidelines for safe and effective vaccines.
Monarez is challenging her dismissal. One of her lawyer’s told Rolling Stone this week: “When CDC Director Susan Monarez refused to rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives and fire dedicated health experts, she chose protecting the public over serving a political agenda. For that, she has been targeted.”
The standoff led to a wave of resignations within the CDC, including Demetre Daskalakis, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases; Debra Houry, CDC chief medical officer; Daniel Jernigan, National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases director; and Jen Layden, director of the CDC Office of Public Health Data, Surveillance and Technology.
“We agreed to do this together. We’ve been talking about it for months, and the past few days, it was just escalating,” Houry told reporters at a protest on Thursday. “If one of us retired, it would have been a blip. When the three of us do it together, it’s more powerful and just shows the state of our agency.”
On Thursday, Kennedy sent an email to staff at the CDC — which was reviewed by Rolling Stone — in which he announced that Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services Jim O’Neill would serve as acting CDC director. O’Neill is a tech investor with no educational background in health or medicine who has spent the last several years promoting dubious anti-aging treatments and amplifying skepticism about the Covid-19 vaccine.
Kennedy wrote that “President Trump and I are aligned on the commonsense vision for the CDC: strengthening the public health infrastructure by returning to its core mission of protecting Americans from communicable diseases by investing in innovation to prevent, detect, and respond to future threats.”
Within the organization, however, staff feels differently.
“MAHA craziness is gonna run the table,” one source told Rolling Stone of the resignations. “It’s really bad now, but things can always get worse.” A former CDC staffer adds: “This is the work of a death cult.”
