More than 1,000 staff at the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) have signed an open letter calling on Robert F Kennedy Junior (RFK) Jr to resign from his post amid claims the health secretary is “endangering the nation’s health”.
The 3 September letter, for which many HHS staffers chose to anonymise their support, highlights numerous actions that RFK Jr has taken since being sworn in as health secretary in February 2025.
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Grievances include RFK Jr’s “refusal” to be briefed by experts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on vaccine-preventable diseases and his decision to rescind the US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) emergency use authorisations for Covid-19 vaccines “without providing the data or methods” used to reach such decision.
The letter read: “We believe health policy should be based on strong, evidence-based principles rather than partisan politics. But under Secretary Kennedy’s leadership, HHS policies are placing the health of all Americans at risk, regardless of their politics.
“[…] We warn the President, Congress, and the Public that Secretary Kennedy’s actions are compromising the health of this nation, and we demand Secretary Kennedy’s resignation.”
This letter is not the first time RFK Jr has been berated for spreading misinformation. The latest letter builds on one issued by HHS staff in the wake of an attack on the CDC’s campus in Atlanta on 8 August. A gunman fired more than 500 rounds at various buildings within the HHS campus and murdered a responding officer before taking his own life. Documents subsequently found at the gunman’s home expressed his belief that the Covid-19 vaccination had ‘caused him harm’, which the letter signatories believed was a contributing factor to the event.
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By GlobalDataThe HHS staff letter from 20 August asserted that the attack came amid “growing mistrust in public institutions”, a factor driven by “politicised rhetoric that has turned public health professionals from trusted experts into targets of villainization – and now, violence.”
Since being appointed health secretary following an intense confirmation hearing wherein RFK Jr was grilled over his numerous misleading remarks about topics ranging from vaccines to claims that “something in the air” was the true cause of autism, various critics have called on the health secretary to stand down.
Ahead of the latest HHS staffers’ letter, Senator Bernie Sanders called for RFK Jr’s resignation in an op-ed in the New York Times.
Sanders wrote: “Despite the overwhelming opposition of the medical community, Secretary Kennedy has continued his longstanding crusade against vaccines and his advocacy of conspiracy theories that have been rejected repeatedly by scientific experts.”
In April, American Public Health Association (APHA) executive director Dr Georges C. Benjamin called for RFK Jr to “resign or be fired”.
Benjamin homed in on the health secretary’s “apparent ignorance” over the potential impact that job cuts across the health agencies nested under the HHS, following remarks RFK Jr made in a televised interview with CBS News on 9 April.
When asked about job cuts, mooted at the time to reduce the workforce at the combined HHS agencies from 82,000 to around 62,000, Kennedy said: “What Elon [Musk] said is that, when you do a disruption of this, a lot of times, 80% of the people that get cut … You may make mistakes, as much as 20[%], and then you go back and remedy that.”
