Kennedy pushes back during heated hearing, seeks return to agency’s original mission

By HPN Staff

Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is looking to refocus the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to what he calls its “core mission” — combating infectious disease. This comes amid high-level criticism of the secretary’s actions, highlighted recently during a fiery Senate Finance Committee hearing. Kennedy faced three hours of grilling by senators following the ousting of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Susan Monarez and changes to vaccine policy.

Kennedy declared this intention in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece prior to the hearing, in the wake of a series of disruptions within the CDC, including:

• A shooting at the CDC’s Atlanta headquarters 
• The firing of Monarez after 29 days on the job 
• The subsequent resignation of three of Monarez’s colleagues. 

These are just the latest events at the department, following:

• The departure in March of five high-level CDC officials, 
• Kennedy’s June firing of all 17 members of the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee 
• The drama which unfolded earlier this summer around the resignation and re-hiring of the FDA’s top vaccine regulator, Dr. Vinay Prasad.

Why it matters

Supporters of Secretary Kennedy and his “Make America Healthy Again” movement have long maintained that the CDC has lost credibility with the public, especially after some actions it took in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Critics of Kennedy’s plan, however,  say that the nation would be deprived of significant scientific progress on the treatment of chronic disease if the CDC were stripped of its responsibility in that area. 

In the WSJ, Kennedy suggested that years of “mission creep” within the CDC have diverted from its role in identifying and preventing infectious disease. He said that currently “only half of the CDC’s budget supports its infectious-disease mission” and that “fewer than 1 in 10 employees are epidemiologists.” 

“That drift explains much of the agency’s disastrous pandemic response,” he said.

Kennedy proposed limiting the CDC’s focus on five priorities:  

1. protecting the nation from infectious disease threats; 
2. building international and domestic infrastructure to detect, track and respond to infectious disease outbreaks; 
3. modernization of data, laboratories and related systems; 
4. increase the number of epidemiologists at the agency;
5. apply “gold standard science” to every recommendation; and 
6. support state and local health departments.

More context

The original mission of the CDC, when it was established in 1949, was to assist states in controlling communicable disease outbreaks, in particular malaria. Since that time, the agency has gone through several evolutions, and its roles have expanded to include addressing such issues as obesity and opioid abuse. The expansion has led some experts to explore reforms to the agency similar to what Kennedy outlined in his article.