Dr. Debra Houry, the CDC’s former chief medical officer, said Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has done “irreparable harm” since taking office.
Houry argued that Americans’ trust in public health has “decreased dramatically” in an interview that aired Sunday on CBS News’ Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan. She was one of several CDC leaders who resigned from the agency last summer over concerns about Kennedy’s leadership.
“I think the secretary has caused a lot of irreparable harm, and when you look at many of the polls out there, the trust in public health, specifically CDC, has decreased dramatically over 20 points in many polls,” Houry said.
“That’s really difficult to recover from, and when states are removing links to the CDC website and following other medical organizations, I don’t know how you build back that trust overnight,” she continued.
Only 50 percent of U.S. adults trust CDC recommendations, according to a survey of 2,205 people conducted between March 19 and April 1 by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the de Beaumont Foundation’s Public Health Listening Lab. That’s down from 77 percent in spring 2025, according to the pollsters.
The Independent has contacted Kennedy’s office for comment.
Houry and several other CDC leaders left the agency in August 2025, with many citing concerns about Kennedy’s vaccine policies. The group resigned shortly after the agency’s director, Susan Monarez, was forced out of her position. Earlier that month, there was also a deadly shooting at the CDC’s Atlanta headquarters.
In her resignation letter, Houry warned that the “overstating of risks” of vaccines, as well as “the rise of misinformation,” has “cost lives, as demonstrated by the highest number of U.S. measles cases in 30 years and the violent attack on our agency.”
Houry chose to leave because she “could no longer protect the scientific integrity of the agency” and had concerns about “the impact on the American public,” she told Brennan.
“We’ve seen measles deaths, we’ve seen whooping cough deaths, we’ve seen children dying from flu. We’re seeing the trust and scientific community go down, the erosion of CDC. I couldn’t stand behind that,” Houry said.
Now, she’s is calling for officials to “protect the American public.”
“I’m just an ER doc, you know, I’m a scientist and a mom, I wanted to work with the administration. Unfortunately, they didn’t want to work with us. They came in with 30 year old theories and didn’t want to follow data or science, and in my mind they’ve put so many lives at risk.”
