By Brenda Goodman, Katherine Dillinger, CNN

(CNN) — Top officials who resigned their positions at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention over the ouster of the agency’s director were escorted out of the building Thursday morning, then celebrated and saluted by CDC staffers in the afternoon.

Before the crowds gathered outside the Atlanta headquarters, some vowed to be the scientists’ and experts’ “loudest advocates.”

Dr. Deb Houry, the chief medical officer; Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, chief of vaccines and respiratory diseases; Dr. Daniel Jernigan, director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases; and data chief Dr. Jennifer Layden had announced their resignations Wednesday. Although they had already been escorted out on Thursday — “by friends,” Houry stressed — staffers still gathered outside the agency’s main office in Atlanta for a tribute called a “clap out.”

“What makes CDC great are the people that make CDC up, the scientists, everyone that makes this a family. And it’s a family that defends our country and the health of our children and the health of adults, whether it’s because of vaccines, whether it’s preventing overdose, chronic disease, stopping Ebola at its source rather than when it came to this continent,” Daskalakis told the crowd. “You are the people that protect America, and America needs to see that you are the people that protect America, and we are going to be your loudest advocates.”

Dr. Daniel Pollock, who retired in 2021 after 37 years at the CDC, called Wednesday’s events “unprecedented.”

“What’s at stake here is not only the future of Americans’ health and well-being but the future of international health and well-being, because so much of what the CDC develops – be it laboratory tests, be it guidelines, be it advice about how to address a public health problem – all of that is used throughout the world, and what’s happening right now is, that’s being devastated,” he told CNN at Thursday’s event. “It will be very, very hard to restore what’s being wasted all through these absolutely unconscionable personnel moves.”

HHS has not responded to CNN’s request for comment about the officials who resigned.

The shakeup at the CDC comes as the Senate Committee on Finance announced that US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will testify on September 4 about President Donald Trump’s health agenda.

Kennedy has never been briefed on measles, expert says

Kennedy has never gotten a briefing on measles, Covid-19 or flu from CDC experts, Daskalakis said Thursday.

“No one from my center has ever briefed him on any of those topics,” he told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins. “He’s getting information from somewhere, but that information is not coming from CDC experts, who really are the world’s experts in this area. … He’s not taken us up on several offers to brief him.”

The US has had more measles cases this year than in any other year since the disease was declared eradicated in 2000, largely because of an outbreak that started in West Texas and primarily affected unvaccinated people. Kennedy drew criticism during that outbreak for promoting treatment with vitamin A and the steroid budesonide over the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine.

HHS did not immediately respond to CNN’s request for comment on Daskalakis’ claim.

Houry told Collins that Dr. Susan Monarez, who was ousted as the agency’s director Wednesday, “was very committed to the CDC and wanted to stay. I think that’s just how we all feel. We want to stay. We believe in the mission, but when you can’t make things work, sometimes leaving is the statement to make.”

The scientists also said Monarez’s ouster leaves it unclear who’s really calling the shots.

“I’ve been at CDC for 30 years,” Jernigan said. “I’ve been through multiple different administrations. We’ve been able to work with a lot of different folks, different ideologies, but we always focused on the science. Right now, I’m not sure, as Dr. Monarez has had to step aside. I don’t know who actually will be making those calls, but I do understand that when we’ve been working on these data that we make decisions from, a lot of that is coming from the White House, is coming from HHS. And so I don’t know exactly where we’re going to go next, but I do know that the CDC has a mission to protect Americans.”

Data that comes from CDC scientists can be trusted, Houry said, but she would have concerns about anything coming from the administration that hasn’t been reviewed or cleared by those scientists. However, she noted, such a distinction may be difficult to spot because of Kennedy’s “personal spin.”

In a Thursday appearance on Fox News, Kennedy said little about the shakeup at the CDC, saying it was inappropriate to talk about “personnel issues.”

“There’s really a deeply, deeply embedded, I would say, malaise at the agency, and we need strong leadership that will go in there and that will be able to execute on President Trump’s broad ambitions for this agency,” Kennedy said. “It may be that some people should not be working there anymore.”

Daskalakis said that — especially in light of a shooting at this agency’s main campus this month that left a police officer dead — any problems start at the top.

“I think the CDC really is a place filled with great scientists and experts,” he told Collins. “And I think that if CDC is being characterized as troubled by Secretary Kennedy, I think we have to turn the mirror back to him, because I think that the trouble is emanating mainly from him. I think that the disregard for experts, the clear statement that experts should not be trusted, really makes it seem unlikely that his mission for CDC is to be a bastion of scientific expertise.

“Additionally, I think that his reaction to what happened when we were attacked really traumatized an already traumatized organization. So I don’t think I want to call it troubled. I think that CDC has made such progress in transforming itself after the pandemic, and that progress is being dismantled.”

Health community reeling

Wednesday night, White House spokesperson Kush Desai said the White House had terminated Monarez from her position.

Monarez’s attorneys, Mark Zaid and Abbe Lowell, said they rejected the notification she received.

“Our client was notified tonight by White House staff in the personnel office that she was fired. As a presidential appointee, senate confirmed officer, only the president himself can fire her,” Zaid and Lowell said in a statement. “For this reason, we reject notification Dr. Monarez has received as legally deficient and she remains as CDC Director. We have notified the White House Counsel of our position.”

Deputy HHS Secretary Jim O’Neill is expected to serve as acting CDC director, sources told CNN on Thursday.

Even as the CDC leaders prepared to say their final goodbyes to the agency, the medical community reeled from the changes.

“Last night’s removal of CDC Director Susan Monarez and the resignations of other CDC leaders are highly alarming at a challenging moment for public health. This destabilization comes at a time when the CDC’s credibility and leadership are more essential than ever,” Dr. Bobby Mukkamala, president of the American Medical Association, said in a statement. “The AMA is deeply concerned that this turmoil leaves us highly susceptible to public health threats.”

“Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is systematically dismantling the public health infrastructure that keeps us safe from pandemics and vaccine-responsive diseases like Covid-19,” wrote Dr. Peter Lurie, president of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, in a statement on the departures.

CNN’s Jacqueline Howard contributed to this report.

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