The White House quickly named a new leader of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) after Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pushed out Director Susan Monarez this week.
Jim O’Neill, a senior Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) official with deep ties to President Trump donor Peter Thiel, will take over the agency amid an exodus of its leadership and panic across the public health world.
The longtime Silicon Valley investor has been a top Kennedy deputy as the Trump administration has sought to enact its “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) agenda, while slashing staff and funding across health agencies.
Kennedy and the White House have said the CDC needs to align with the administration’s MAHA priorities and shift away from a focus on vaccines.
In his first public statement since being chosen, O’Neill, who does not come from a medical background, called the CDC the “beating heart of public health in America.”
“During the previous administration, CDC lost public trust by manipulating health data to support a political narrative. The Trump administration is rebuilding trust and refocusing CDC on its core mission of keeping America safe from infectious disease,” O’Neill wrote on social platform X.
“We have invested in new screening technology to detect infections from foreign travelers, stopped the Texas measles outbreak, and ended the misuse of the childhood immunization schedule for Covid vaccine mandates,” he added.
“We are helping the agency earn back the trust it had squandered. I look forward to working with CDC’s dedicated team and announcing additions to the senior leadership in the weeks ahead.”
O’Neill served during the George W. Bush administration as principal associate deputy secretary at the HHS, before beginning his career as a tech investor. Prior to joining the second Trump administration, he was managing director at Thiel’s Mithril Capital Management and also served as CEO of the Thiel Foundation.
He was confirmed as deputy HHS secretary in June, about a month before Monarez was confirmed by the Senate. It’s unclear how long O’Neill might remain in the interim CDC role or whether he’s a candidate for the permanent position.
Like Thiel, a libertarian who has long advocated restrained government intervention, O’Neill has similarly called for a laissez-faire attitude toward federal regulation.
In a 2014 speech, O’Neill called for pushing against the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) mission to consider the efficacy of drugs in its decision to approve them, saying the agency should only consider safety.
“We should reform FDA so that it’s approving 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 said at the time.
As Bloomberg reported in 2016, O’Neill advocated creating a freer market for health care products and services.
“Basically, because there’s not a free market in health care, people are suffering very significant health consequences that in a free market they would not suffer,” O’Neill said, arguing it would drive down prices and increase innovation.
The MIT Technology Review reported in June that O’Neill is deeply embedded in the “longevity” community, people who wish to extend the human lifespan. Thiel is also an ardent longevity enthusiast. O’Neill was on the board of the anti-aging nonprofit foundation SENS Research Foundation.
O’Neill’s interest apparently extends to the point of achieving “immortality.”
“You can tell a lot about an era by listening to what people whine about,” O’Neill said in the same 2014 speech he advocated for less FDA regulation. “If we invest wisely in life extension technologies, in 40 years, we’ll all be able to annoy our friends with complaints like ‘immortality almost never works.’”
The watchdog group Accountable US said in a statement Friday that O’Neill’s deep ties to Thiel and medical companies presented too many areas of conflict for him to be acting CDC director.
“If made acting Director of the Trump CDC, Jim O’Neill would be in a prime position to ensure favorable outcomes for several medical industry startups he’s been financially linked to that have direct business before HHS and the CDC,” Accountable US Executive Director Tony Carrk said.
“How can American patients be sure that proper vetting of these companies would take place on O’Neill’s watch and that public health will be a higher priority over the profits of his former clients?” Carrk continued. “They can’t.”
Trump has yet to personally comment on Monarez’s ouster or the leadership crisis unfolding at the CDC. Attorneys representing Monarez resisted her ouster, saying only Trump had final say on her removal.
The White House said Monarez was pushed out for not being fully aligned the MAGA agenda. Her lawyers say she refused to “rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives.”