Former surgeon general Jerome Adams has a rule for himself: focus on the policy, not the person. But last week, he broke that rule when he called for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be removed from his post as Health and Human Services secretary.
Adams, who served as surgeon general during President Trump’s first administration, has become a prominent critic of public health policy in the president’s second term. He is particularly active on X, where he often goes toe-to-toe with science skeptics.
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STAT spoke with Adams about what pushed him to call for Kennedy’s removal, the fallout from the latest chaos inside the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the growing unease inside Republican health circles.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You became a major public health advocate on social media during your time as surgeon general, but since then there have been moments where you have stepped away from online platforms. These days, you’re very active again. What was it that brought you back?
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When I was surgeon general, that was my job. It was my job to communicate with the public, so I had to figure out and struggle through how to do it. Post-surgeon general, I continue to ask myself, “Is it my job anymore to do this on behalf of America?” Especially when so many people are attacking me and my family.
But we’re in a moment now where I really do feel like our health, the future we’re leaving to my kids and my grandkids, is in jeopardy. When you look at the CDC shooting that happened — that was, to me, really the big moment that pushed me off the fence post.
My approach has always been, discuss the policy, not the person. I’ve tried to keep it from being personal. I’ve tried very, very hard, because I think when it becomes personal you can lose objectivity, and people see that it’s personal.
But that said, when the CDC shooting happened a little over a month ago now, I was getting phone calls in real time from my colleagues, from people who used to report to me, from my friends at the CDC, saying, “the Secretary hasn’t made a statement on this. Can you please go out and say something to help tone down the violence out here?” Because they felt like they were under attack.
And so it was a moment where we really needed our HHS secretary to come out and strongly condemn the violence and to say, this is unacceptable. Well, that’s not what he did. He waited 18 hours to make a tepid statement, which was really capitulating to his base, and in the meantime, he posted fishing pictures.
To me that was a failure, an absolute failure of leadership, and it’s one of the many reasons that I’m now of the opinion that he needs to go — because he’s lost his troops. They literally do not feel safe, physically safe, emotionally safe, working for him, and I don’t know how you’re going to run one of the largest agencies on the planet when the people under you have lost complete and total trust in you.
When you were surgeon general, you were working to establish public trust in institutions like the CDC. Now, Kennedy has replaced the members of the CDC’s vaccine recommendation panel. There’s been an ousting of leadership. So what do you do in this new reality where everything is turned on its head? Who do you tell people to listen to?
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That is yet another reason why, just in this last week, I’ve come out publicly and said RFK has got to go. Because he pledged to restore trust in these institutions. And not subjectively — objectively, we can prove that trust in the CDC, the FDA, HHS have plummeted to an all-time low during his tenure and directly because of him and the misinformation he’s sown. AAP, ACOG, AAFP, these major physicians groups are literally telling their patients, “you cannot trust the CDC anymore because of RFK.”
One of the things that we need to do is try to help Congress and the president understand the unique and devastating ways in which RFK’s tenure has been a failure, in the hopes that they put someone more competent in that role.
I have been having conversations with former CDC directors, former surgeons general, other health advocates, to try to figure out, okay, what positively can we do? One of the things we’re looking at is, can we direct people towards new entities like CIDRAP or Common Health Coalition, so that they understand where to go to get the facts.
Something that I always will emphasize in every interview that I do is to try to work in, “talk to your doctor, talk to your pharmacist, talk to your nurse,” because we know most people get and trust health information locally.
What else was on your mind when you made the decision to call for Kennedy’s removal?
Well, he lied to Congress. It’s actually very clear now — if you take the statements that he made during his confirmation hearing, and the things that he’s done since then, and then his explanations for them in his most recent hearing — there’s only one of two conclusions you could come to. He’s either a bald-faced liar, or he’s incredibly incompetent and doesn’t understand what he’s talking about.
Those are the only two conclusions that you can legitimately come to based on comparing his own statements. Statements like, “100% of people can get the vaccine if they choose it.” Both he and FDA Commissioner Marty Makary said that. They’re either lying, or they’re incredibly incompetent to the point that they don’t understand all the ways in which they have set up new and unique barriers for people being able to access vaccines, that contradict their pledge that they made.
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He keeps repeating and emphasizing just complete falsehoods about autism, about thimerosal, about hepatitis B vaccines, and stoking fear that is going to cause real harm to the public.
You were inside of President Trump’s Covid-19 Task Force, and you had a front row seat for a lot of the early pandemic. What does this feel like for you to see the dismantling of the mechanisms that we had in place to create mRNA vaccines? Does it keep you up at night?
Personally, it keeps me up at night because my wife has metastatic melanoma. MRNA technology is, was, being used to develop cures for cancer. And now that means that if my wife has a recurrence, she may not have the medication, the cure, the innovation that will keep her alive because of RFK. So this, again, this is in many ways personal.
Professionally, as a physician, I have seen the miracles that mRNA technology have allowed. This is why I actually argue that President Trump should be considered for the Nobel Prize for Operation Warp Speed — because Bill Gates, Tony Fauci, in June of 2020 were saying it could still be 18 to 24 months before we had a vaccine. We had it less than six months after they made those statements. It shocks me that now we’ve taken that option off the table — because it’s not if, it’s when we have the next big outbreak, the next pandemic.
You still have a lot of connections with people who are within the current Trump administration. What are the sorts of things that people are worried about on the inside?
I do talk to a lot of people on the inside. I talk to a lot of people on the outside. I talk to big-time Republican donors. The challenge that people are having is that many people, myself included, desperately want to have hope about the focus on chronic disease that RFK has talked about, the focus on nutrition and physical activity that he has talked about. People are excited about that.
The problem is they’re having to weigh that against the threat of him taking away vaccine access from people. I will tell you that most Republicans who I talked to are pro-vaccine, and they’re very concerned about the things that Kennedy is doing. They’ve reached a point where they’re shifting from hopeful that the good outweighs the harm, to just hopeful that he will eventually go away. But again, the same people are very afraid to get on the wrong side of Donald Trump.
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It’s a line that you try to walk. And this is why I’ve taken that approach of focus on the policy and not the person. And why I’m in a concerning situation right now. I always try to say, “here’s scientifically, here’s medically why what he’s doing is dangerous.” And I think the president understands and respects that, and that’s in many cases why I haven’t drawn his ire even though I’ve become increasingly vocal of one of his most popular Cabinet secretaries.
Is there anything else you would like people to know?
The stats are that 70% of Republicans and 90% of Democrats support vaccines. The problem is the people who don’t are much louder than the people who do, and they’re drowning them out. And so to the public, I would say it is important that you call your legislators, that you call your members of Congress, that you call your senators, that you call your governor’s office, and let them know that you support vaccines and that you want our country to be one in which our kids don’t have to deal with vaccine-preventable diseases.