Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is pressuring Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to resign after this week’s tumult at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that saw top officials depart after the agency director was ousted.
Sanders, the ranking member on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, said that he agrees with President Trump and Kennedy on making the public “healthy again,” but warned that the problem is that “since coming into office President Trump and Mr. Kennedy have done exactly the opposite.”
“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 in an op-ed for The New York Times, which was published Saturday morning.
“It is absurd to have to say this in 2025, but vaccines are safe and effective. That, of course, is not just my view,” the Vermont senator added. “Far more important, it is the overwhelming consensus of the medical and scientific communities.”
NewsNation sister website The Hill has reached out to HHS for comment.
Sanders’s call for Kennedy to resign comes as the CDC’s director Susan Monarez was fired on Wednesday. Her termination pushed four other top officials at the agency to resign later that day, accusing the administration of weaponizing public health.
Kennedy and the White House have defended the firing of Monarez, with the press secretary telling reporters on Thursday that the president has the “authority to fire those who are not aligned with his mission.”
“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 said during the briefing.
The firing of Monarez and the resignations of officials rocked the public health community and drew mixed reactions on Capitol Hill.
Sanders called for a bipartisan investigation into the ouster of Monarez on Thursday, hammering the administration for making a “reckless” and “dangerous” decision.
In the op-ed, Sanders criticized Kennedy’s vaccine skepticism and added that the “reality is that Secretary Kennedy has profited from and built a career on sowing mistrust in vaccines. Now, as head of H.H.S., he is using his authority to launch a full-blown war on science, on public health and on truth itself.”
The progressive senator argued that it will become “harder” for Americans to get “lifesaving vaccines” during Kennedy’s tenure at HHS and claimed that the former presidential candidate will target the childhood immunization schedule.
“The danger here is that diseases that have been virtually wiped out because of safe and effective vaccines will resurface and cause enormous harm,” Sanders wrote.
Sanders said that the U.S. needs to be better prepared if another pandemic, such as COVID-19, breaks out and that Kennedy’s leadership is making the “situation even worse,” referencing HHS ending $500 million in federal funding for mRNA vaccine development.
“Secretary Kennedy is putting Americans’ lives in danger, and he must resign,” Sanders wrote. “In his place, President Trump must listen to doctors and scientists and nominate a health secretary and a C.D.C. director who will protect the health and well-being of the American people, not carry out dangerous policies based on conspiracy theories.”
The Trump administration selected Deputy HHS Secretary Jim O’Neill to be the acting director of the CDC on Thursday.
