The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has long provided reliable health guidance and protection. Now its role and independence from politics are in question after a series of shakeups. In the seven months since Robert F. Kennedy Jr. became health secretary, the agency has lost thousands of employees, about half its budget and contracts, and much of its authority over vaccine policies.

Dr. Susan Monarez, a career scientist, was fired as director Aug. 27 in a vaccine dispute less than a month after her Senate confirmation. A White House statement said Dr. Monarez was "not aligned with the president's agenda of Making America Healthy Again." Her lawyers say she "refused to rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives and fire dedicated health experts," while she says in the Wall Street Journal that Kennedy leads "a deliberate effort to weaken America's public-health system and vaccine protections. That isn't reform. It is sabotage."

In an email to CDC employees, Kennedy pledged to "rebuild this institution into what it was always meant to be: a guardian of America's health and security." As acting director, the White House appointed biotech investor Jim O'Neill, a Kennedy ally with no training in medicine who previously embraced conspiracy theories about covid. Four top CDC scientists quit in protest, saying Americans' health is at risk. Kennedy "has fired thousands of federal health workers and severely weakened programs designed to protect Americans from cancer, heart attacks, strokes, lead poisoning, injury, violence and more," they wrote in a New York Times commentary. "Amid the largest measles outbreak in the United States in a generation, he's focused on unproven treatments while downplaying vaccines. He canceled investments in promising medical research that will leave us ill-prepared for future health emergencies. He replaced experts on federal health advisory committees with unqualified individuals who share his dangerous and unscientific views."

At a combative Senate hearing last week, the health secretary said he doesn't believe vaccines saved millions of lives in the United States and elsewhere during the Covid pandemic. He also restated: "Parents should be free to make their own choices" about children's shots to prevent polio, measles, mumps, measles, flu and other diseases. Days earlier in a Wall Street Journal guest column, he wrote: "The American people elected President Trump—not entrenched bureaucrats—to set health policy."

In addition to congressional criticism, academics and columnists also express concern. The CDC is "not supposed to be partisan," says Chris Edelson, an assistant professor of government at American University in Washington, D.C. "The biggest danger is the institution loses credibility, and people can't count on it." Times columnist Maureen Dowd writes: "Kennedy has stacked the C.D.C. advisory committee with vaccine skeptics and outright anti-vaxxers." At the same New York paper, David French writes: "Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is waging a reckless war against the foundations of our nation’s public health."

Secretary Kennedy says: "The CDC must restore public trust—and that restoration has begun. It won't stop until America's public-health institutions again serve the people with transparency, honesty and integrity."