In an email, the CDC staff back to the office weeks after an armed man shot bullets at the agency’s headquarters, the interferral centers for disease control and the prevention director Jim O’Neill wrote on Tuesday that the agency had lost the confidence of the Americans and was experiencing a “mission flue” that has led him to be too involved in the health decisions of the Americans.
In the email, dated Tuesday and obtained by ABC News, O’Neill told the CDC staff that he expected his “return to be without problems” and pointed out “improved and repairs on the Roybal campus” in Atlanta, Georgia.
Interim Director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Jim O’Neill.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
He praised the achievements of the CDCs of decades ago, including his combination of malaria and HIV, and pointed out his work this year on the measles outbreak in Texas and an Ebola outbreak in Africa.
But O’Neill made it clear that the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now demands a different approach to CDC, one by which the agency reduces its role in the lives of Americans.
“Mission Creep has distracted us from our central mission over the years,” O’Neill wrote. “Not all health decisions are government issues, and CDCs do not need to double the work of other divisions.”
O’Neill, the Deputy Secretary of the HHS to whom Kennedy appointed as an interim director of the CDC after the dismissal of Susan Monarch last month, said that the agency had “lost American public confidence” during the pandemic, but that the new leadership of HHS is “working hard to renounce and recover that confidence.”
“Rigorous science, transparency on data and reasoning, and the treatment of our fellow citizens as adults who can make their own informed decisions will be well received when we can offer them,” he added.
Technically, CDC only offers guidance and does not have the ability to demand people’s behavior; Things like the mandates of the school vaccine, for example, are decided and implemented at the state level.
Fiona Havers, former CDC official who worked in vaccine policy, told ABC News: “CDC have always treated Americans as adults by providing them with evidence and science -based orientation they need to make their own decisions.”
In his email, O’Neill urged the staff to “think big. What is the 2026 equivalent of eradicating malaria? How could a CDC, without restrictions on whom, where can I apply the principle of radical transparency to my work?”
President Donald Trump signed an executive order in January withdrawing to the United States from the World Health Organization (WHO).
O’Neill’s email occurred on the eve of the highly anticipated Public Hearing of Monaez on Wednesday in front of the Senate Health Committee, during which he claimed that Kennedy demanded that he approve recommendations of modified vaccines “in advance” by an independent panel that testified Monaz was not backed by scientific evidence or other data.
Monaz also testified in his opening statement that Kennedy ordered him to “rule out the career officials responsible for the vaccine policy without cause.”
Monarch testified: “I was fired for maintaining the line of scientific integrity.”
Later, an HHS spokesman said that Monarch’s testimony had “objective inaccuracies and set aside the important details”, and described his dismissal as a consequence of his performance “maliciously to undermine the president’s agenda and was fired as a result.”
