09/05/2025
NNU nurses are calling for RFK, Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, to be fired by President Donald Trump or to resign.
“Secretary Kennedy’s seven-month tenure at our nation’s highest public health agency has been characterized by one disaster after another, and it has dangerously eroded public trust in the institutions that are so critical for the health and safety of all Americans. It is time for him to go,” said NNU President Mary Turner, RN.
On Monday, Kennedy demanded Susan Monarez, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) either resign or be fired. That was followed today when federal guards escorted three top CDC officials from the agency’s Atlanta headquarters.
What the New York Times called the “chaos” at the CDC followed what NNU calls “a disastrous and extremely dangerous decision” by the Federal Drug Administration, which is under the HHS umbrella, to limit updated Covid-19 vaccinations to people at risk for serious complications because they are 65 or older or have other health problems.
“This decision alone, which symbolizes Secretary Kennedy’s hostility to life saving vaccines, that was also evident in the fatal measles outbreak earlier this year, is not only a major risk with the ongoing threat of Covid and further mutations of the virus, it symbolizes why his continued leadership of our public health programs must be ended,” said Turner.
“As bad as things have been since January, the firing of thousands of federal health workers, extreme budget cuts, the ongoing assault on our nation’s vaccination system, what we saw yesterday was another level entirely — an extraordinary and systematic dismantling of the very top of our nation’s public health system,” said Dr. Richard Besser, a former acting director of the agency, as the New York Times reported Thursday.
And in his resignation letter, Demetre Daskalakis, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, one of the top CDC staff who was pushed out of the CDC headquarters today, wrote, “I am not able to serve in this role any longer because of the ongoing weaponizing of public health.”
