Topline
The White House selected Health and Human Services Deputy Secretary Jim O’Neill as the next acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to The Washington Post, tapping the technology investor for the role as former CDC leadership protested against the Trump administration and its contested firing of ex-CDC Director Susan Monarez.
Key Facts
O’Neill has been tapped to take over as the acting director of the CDC, the Post reported, citing two unnamed sources familiar with the decision who said O’Neill would maintain his role as HHS deputy secretary.
Hundreds of staffers and protesters demonstrated outside the CDC’s Atlanta headquarters Thursday afternoon for at least an hour.
Daniel Jernigan, director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, is one of multiple CDC leaders who resigned from the agency this week, and said Thursday’s walkout was to “get the politics out of public health” and “let the science lead us, because that’s how we get to the best decisions for public health.”
Jernigan resigned from the CDC this week alongside the agency’s chief medical officer, Debra Houry, and Demetre Daskalakis, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.
Houry said her and CDC leadership “reached a tipping point,” calling out HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s promotion of “vitamins over vaccines” and saying “we knew it was a powerful statement for the three of us to do this together.”
Protesters also took issue with the ouster of Monarez, whose lawyers have rejected the White House’s termination of the director, arguing as a “presidential appointee, senate confirmed officer, only the president himself can fire her.”
Forbes has reached out to the White House for confirmation on O’Neill’s selection.
Who Is Jim O’neill?
O’Neill, who was sworn in as HHS deputy secretary in June, worked with the agency in the 2000s as the principal associate deputy secretary, leading food safety regulation reforms at the Food and Drug Administration before transitioning into investing. O’Neill’s investment ventures have been closely tied with billionaire PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, who donated to Trump in 2016 and Vice President JD Vance in 2022. O’Neill served as the Thiel Foundation’s CEO from 2009 to 2012 and was managing director at Thiel’s venture capital firm, Mithril Capital, from 2012 to 2019. In 2016, O’Neill said drug efficacy should be proven after legalization, suggesting the FDA should approve “drugs after their sponsors have demonstrated safety—and let people start using them, at their own risk, but not much risk of safety.” O’Neill has claimed to be “very strongly pro-vaccine.”
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