Former CDC Doctor Says Science Was Ignored Under Kennedy's Leadership

Dr. Debra Houry worked at the CDC for 11 years before she quit in August 2025. The CDC, or Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is the main U.S. government agency that tracks and prevents disease. Dr. Houry served as its chief medical officer, one of the most important medical jobs at the agency. She kept hundreds of emails to record what was happening inside the CDC after the new administration took over.

Dr. Houry said she started saving those emails right away because she was worried that science was being pushed aside for political reasons. She said she wanted history to have a clear record of how decisions were being made. A Senate committee later made 250 of those emails public. The documents showed a pattern of political leaders overruling medical experts.

One of the first things that troubled Dr. Houry was when hundreds of CDC websites were taken down. An executive order told agencies to remove anything related to 'gender ideology,' but the word 'gender' appeared in many medical data sets. This included guides that helped doctors treat certain diseases. Most pages eventually came back online, but with a note saying they were written before the order.

Dr. Houry also described a rush to restore vaccine web pages just after Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. finished his confirmation hearings. Staff were told the missing vaccine information could hurt Kennedy's chances of being confirmed, since he had expressed doubts about vaccines. Teams were called in on a Saturday morning to get the pages back up. Dr. Houry said this showed that politics, not science, was driving decisions.

During a deadly flu season — the worst in more than 15 years — nearly 300 children died. The CDC had been running ads urging people to get flu shots, but Kennedy ordered all those ads pulled down just one day after he was sworn in. Dr. Houry said she thought it was a misunderstanding at first, but the order was confirmed as coming directly from the secretary. She believes removing those ads hurt public health.

The country also faced its worst measles outbreak since 2000. Kennedy's aides asked the CDC for old data on measles cases instead of focusing on the current outbreak. Dr. Houry tried to correct Kennedy when he made false public statements about vaccines, but no corrections were ever made. She said Kennedy's team also pushed the CDC to look only at a possible link between vaccines and autism, ignoring all other possible causes.

Dr. Houry said she was not told about a major change to COVID-19 vaccine guidance. Kennedy announced on social media that the CDC would no longer recommend the COVID vaccine for healthy pregnant women and children. No one at the CDC, including Dr. Houry, was warned ahead of time. She later found that a memo about the change had been written weeks before the announcement.

She also raised alarms about a researcher named David Geier, who was hired by Kennedy to access the CDC's vaccine safety database from his home. Maryland had previously disciplined Geier for practicing medicine without a license. Dr. Houry said he was allowed to skip the normal privacy and research rules that all CDC scientists must follow. She brought in lawyers and privacy officers to document her concerns.

Dr. Houry quit the CDC because she felt she could no longer protect its scientific integrity. She said the agency lost about 30 percent of its workforce, and eventually about 80 percent of its senior leaders were gone. Political leaders sometimes did not even know about those cuts. She said the result was an agency unable to fully protect the public.

A Senate committee released Dr. Houry's emails to the public, and she hopes they lead to a full investigation. She said she has seen trust in the CDC drop by more than 20 points in public polls. Twenty-nine states plus Washington, D.C., have said they will no longer use CDC recommendations as a guide for childhood vaccines. Dr. Houry said she does not know how to rebuild that trust quickly.