Inside the Trump Administration’s Vaccine Politics
Trump embraced the MAHA movement’s antivaccine supporters; now a crisis is unfolding at the CDC under RFK Jr.’s leadership
Aug. 28, 2025 The Wall Street Journal
President Trump privately said he wished he could tout Operation Warp Speed.
The CDC is in turmoil after the director was fired and other officials quit over vaccine-policy disagreements.
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- President Trump privately said he wished he could tout Operation Warp Speed.View more
As President Trump sat with top donors at his New Jersey golf club this month, he made a private admission: He believed the coronavirus vaccine was one of the biggest accomplishments of his presidency, but he couldn’t bask in it.
Trump told donors at a dinner—who were paying $1 million to be there—that he wished he could talk more about Operation Warp Speed, the government program he initiated that helped expedite the development of the vaccine, attendees said. The guests included Pfizer Chief Executive Albert Bourla, whose company developed one of the first Covid-19 vaccines.
Trump’s private comments illuminate the fraught politics around vaccines that the White House is confronting, which reached a boiling point Wednesday after the administration fired the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other top officials quit their jobs in the midst of disagreements with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over vaccine policy.
The agency is now facing a crisis. Longtime officials there said Kennedy is ignoring scientific findings to pursue an antivaccine agenda, threatening public health as the calendar gets closer to winter and seasonal outbreaks of Covid and other viruses.
A spokesman for HHS didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Trump has embraced Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” movement and its antivaccine constituents, who were key supporters during the 2024 election. He has also given Kennedy, himself a vaccine skeptic, wide latitude at HHS to undertake an aggressive remaking of the federal government’s vast healthcare bureaucracy.
During a three-hour cabinet meeting Tuesday, Trump said he couldn’t wait to see Kennedy’s long-awaited findings about autism. Sitting close to the president, Kennedy had just said that there has been a huge surge in the number of autistic children nationwide and certain “interventions” were causing it, which he said he would detail in September. Kennedy has previously linked the increased frequency of autism to vaccines.
“There has to be something artificially causing this, meaning a drug or something, and I know you’re looking very strongly at different things,” Trump said after Kennedy’s remarks.
Most scientists consider vaccines safe and say their benefits—preventing deadly or serious disease—outweigh rare and uncommon risks. Several studies haven’t found a link between vaccines and autism, and scientists and public-health experts say expanded criteria for diagnosis, increased awareness and more screening contribute to higher rates of autism.
Kennedy’s promotion of vaccine skepticism has prompted panic within the CDC, which is part of his department and was in turmoil even before Trump fired CDC Director Susan Monarez on Wednesday night.
A swath of layoffs across HHS and proposed budget cuts threaten the agency’s decades of work. Kennedy removed all members of a key committee that recommends vaccine guidance, detailing the actions in a Wall Street Journal opinion article, and replaced them with members who include vaccine opponents.
And, earlier this month, a man who authorities said had been critical of the Covid-19 vaccine showered the agency’s Atlanta headquarters with bullets—an action that current and former employees said felt like the physical embodiment of growing distrust in America’s public-health institutions.
The shooting occurred just days after Monarez was sworn in as the CDC’s new director. The agency was operating for months without a permanent leader after the White House withdrew its first choice, Dr. Dave Weldon, a former congressman, when it became clear he didn’t have the votes to be confirmed as some Republicans expressed concern over his antivaccine views.
Some senior CDC leaders felt optimistic about Monarez’s appointment, believing she could establish a line of communication with HHS leaders and would uphold scientific standards.
“I even told her, ‘If you leave, we’re gone,’ ” Dr. Debra Houry, the CDC’s chief medical officer, who resigned shortly after Monarez’s departure, said in an interview Thursday. “Once we knew that she was going to be out the door, that was it.”
Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases; Dr. Daniel Jernigan, director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases; and Houry increasingly felt the cumulative effect of Kennedy’s changes had compromised the agency’s integrity by placing ideology over science. They decided if they were to leave, they would do so together.
This week, they reached their tipping point. “Enough was enough,” Houry said.
Monarez had been ordered to dismiss senior CDC leaders and approve future vaccine recommendations from the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which, under Kennedy’s leadership, has placed an emphasis on the possible risks of vaccines rather than the diseases they are created to prevent. When she said she couldn’t do either, Kennedy instructed her to resign.
But after Monarez said late Wednesday she wasn’t resigning, the White House put out a statement saying it had fired her. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Monarez initially said she would resign but then reversed herself. “So, the president fired her,” Leavitt told reporters Thursday. “The president has the authority to fire those who are not aligned with this mission.”
Houry, Daskalakis and Jernigan announced their resignations Wednesday evening.
The departing CDC leaders, who had worked in the agency under Republican and Democratic administrations, take with them decades of institutional knowledge. Under Kennedy’s leadership, Daskalakis said, his subject-matter experts never briefed the secretary on issues such as Covid-19 or measles, and CDC staff learned about changes to vaccine guidelines through public posts on X or opinion articles.
“He is getting his data and information from somewhere,” said Daskalakis, who joined the CDC under Trump’s first administration, in an interview. “I can’t locate where that is, so I have some great ideas. Quite certainly it’s not coming from CDC.”
“When the science is going to be used for a point of view that’s already been predestined, that’s the end of my time here,” he added.
Asked about the flood of resignations during a television interview Thursday, Kennedy declined to comment on personnel issues but pointed to “problems” at the CDC stemming from its handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“There’s really a deeply, deeply embedded, I would say, malaise at the agency,” Kennedy said on “Fox & Friends.” “We need to fix it, and we are fixing it.”
The shake-up comes at a precarious time for public health, with the rollout of updated Covid and flu shots expected this fall as the nation enters the peak season for respiratory illnesses. Already, healthcare providers have voiced concern over the impact of mixed messaging from the federal government on whether people should get vaccinated.
In a departure from previous years, the Food and Drug Administration authorized new Covid booster shots on Wednesday for a smaller population after the Trump administration released a more stringent set of guidelines for approving them. Earlier this year, under Kennedy, the CDC dropped its recommendations that healthy children and healthy pregnant women get coronavirus shots as a matter of routine.
Some doctors have begun warning patients that it might be difficult to obtain Covid shots this fall and that insurers might not be willing to cover them for those who don’t fall under the new federal recommendations. Limited access to vaccines or another severe outbreak of coronavirus could carry political risks for the White House.
Behind closed doors, Trump continues to lament he can’t take more credit for the Covid vaccine. At another donor dinner at the White House earlier this year, Trump joked with Pfizer’s Bourla about how much money the company made off the coronavirus vaccine, people who attended the dinner said. Pfizer received billions of dollars in advance purchase orders for its unfinished Covid vaccine in 2020 from the Trump administration.
Write to Jennifer Calfas at jennifer.calfas@wsj.com, Josh Dawsey at Joshua.Dawsey@WSJ.com and Sabrina Siddiqui at sabrina.siddiqui@wsj.com
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Appeared in the August 29, 2025, print edition as 'Uprising at CDC Exposes Rifts In President’s MAHA Alliance'.