Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is pressuring Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to resign after this week’s tumult at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that saw top officials depart after the agency director was ousted. 

Sanders, the ranking member on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, said that he agrees with President Trump and Kennedy on making the public “healthy again,” but warned that the problem is that “since coming into office President Trump and Mr. Kennedy have done exactly the opposite.” 

“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,” Sanders wrote in an op-ed for The New York Times, which was published Saturday morning. 

“It is absurd to have to say this in 2025, but vaccines are safe and effective. That, of course, is not just my view,” the Vermont senator added. “Far more important, it is the overwhelming consensus of the medical and scientific communities.” 

The Hill has reached out to HHS for comment. 

Sanders’s call for Kennedy to resign comes as the CDC’s director Susan Monarez was fired on Wednesday. Her termination pushed four other top officials at the agency to resign later that day, accusing the administration of weaponizing public health. 

Kennedy and the White House have defended the firing of Monarez, with the press secretary telling reporters on Thursday that the president has the “authority to fire those who are not aligned with his mission.” 

“The president and Secretary Kennedy are committed to restoring trust and transparency and credibility to the CDC by ensuring their leadership and their decisions are more public-facing, more accountable, strengthening our public health system and restoring it to its core mission of protecting Americans from communicable diseases, investing in innovation to prevent, detect and respond to future threats,” Leavitt said during the briefing.

The firing of Monarez and the resignations of officials rocked the public health community and drew mixed reactions on Capitol Hill. 

Sanders called for a bipartisan investigation into the ouster of Monarez on Thursday, hammering the administration for making a “reckless” and “dangerous” decision. 

In the op-ed, Sanders criticized Kennedy’s vaccine skepticism and added that the “reality is that Secretary Kennedy has profited from and built a career on sowing mistrust in vaccines. Now, as head of H.H.S., he is using his authority to launch a full-blown war on science, on public health and on truth itself.” 

The progressive senator argued that it will become “harder” for Americans to get “lifesaving vaccines” during Kennedy’s tenure at HHS and claimed that the former presidential candidate will target the childhood immunization schedule. 

“The danger here is that diseases that have been virtually wiped out because of safe and effective vaccines will resurface and cause enormous harm,” Sanders wrote. 

Sanders said that the U.S. needs to be better prepared if another pandemic, such as COVID-19, breaks out and that Kennedy’s leadership is making the “situation even worse,” referencing HHS ending $500 million in federal funding for mRNA vaccine development. 

“Secretary Kennedy is putting Americans’ lives in danger, and he must resign,” Sanders wrote. “In his place, President Trump must listen to doctors and scientists and nominate a health secretary and a C.D.C. director who will protect the health and well-being of the American people, not carry out dangerous policies based on conspiracy theories.” 

The Trump administration selected Deputy HHS Secretary Jim O’Neill to be the acting director of the CDC on Thursday. 

President Trump on Saturday spent time on the golf course, dispelling rumors that health issues were keeping the president out of the public eye.

He was spotted at Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Va., after his schedule was void of public events for several days in a row. The empty agenda set off a flurry of social media posts raising questions about the president’s health after a photograph of bruising on his hand during a White House Cabinet meeting went viral.

Veteran journalist Laura Rozen in a thread on social platform X has kept tabs on the president in recent days, fostering responses from the public about why Trump was steering clear of the media. On Saturday, she reposted photos of the president at his Virginia golf course.

Vice President Vance earlier this week also brought Trump’s health back into the spotlight in an interview with USA Today on Wednesday. Vance said he was prepared to step in should something happen to the president though he noted that the commander in chief is “incredibly good health.”

“Yes, terrible tragedies happen,” he said. “But I feel very confident the president of the United States is in good shape, is going to serve out the remainder of his term and do great things for the American people.”

“And if, God forbid, there’s a terrible tragedy, I can’t think of better on-the-job training than what I’ve gotten over the last 200 days,” the vice president added.

His comments come just over a year after Trump’s ear was grazed by a bullet during an assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania.

Trump, 79, became the oldest president to be sworn in when he returned to the Oval Office in January.

Speculation around his health was also reignited last month after White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced during a press briefing that he had undergone testing for swelling in his legs and bruises on his hands, such as the one shone in the photo that circulated earlier this month.

He was diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency, a common condition for people over 70 where their veins struggle to pump blood back up to the heart. The bruises are often covered up with makeup.

Vance and other Trump allies have brushed off potential health issues, pointing to the president’s stamina and energy.

“He’s the last person making phone calls at night, and he’s the first person who wakes up and the first person making phone calls in the morning,” the vice president said Wednesday.

The concerns also come as Trump has seen a dip in his approval rating in recent polling.

The president also sat for an in-person interview with The Daily Caller earlier this week, which was published on Saturday.

President Trump cast doubt on the prospects of a meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as part of an effort to end the war in Eastern Europe, suggesting that “maybe they have to fight a little longer.” 

The president, in an interview with The Daily Caller, expressed confidence that a trilateral meeting between himself, Putin and Zelensky could materialize, but had less confidence in the bilateral huddle between the two Eastern European leaders. 

“A [trilateral] would happen. A [bilateral], I don’t know about, but a tri will happen. But, you know, sometimes people aren’t ready for it,” Trump told the Caller’s White House correspondent Reagan Reese in an interview published Saturday.

“I say … I use the analogy. I’ve used it a couple of times. You have a child, and there’s another child in the lot, in the playground, and they hate each other, and they start swinging, swinging and swinging, and you want them to stop, and they keep going,” he continued. “After a little while, they’re very happy to stop. Do you understand that? It’s almost that way. Sometimes they have to fight for a little bit before you can get them to stop.”

The president added, “But this has been going on for a long time. A lot of people are dead.” 

Trump, as part of his effort to bring an end to the roughly three-and-half-year-war, has pushed for a meeting between Zelensky and Putin. The Ukrainian leader, who also met with the president earlier this month, has signaled a willingness to sit down with the Kremlin leader, but Russian officials have so far rejected it. 

For now, Russia appears to be slow-walking the administration’s effort to broker a peace deal to end the fighting. Ukraine has rejected the prospect of making large territorial concessions to end the war, as U.S. and European officials have continued discussing potential post-conflict security guarantees to prevent another invasion. 

Trump, again, ruled out having U.S. troops on the ground as part of a security guarantee, but signaled openness to offering U.S. air support to help halt the war, something he floated earlier this month. 

“Maybe we’ll do something. Look, I’d like to see something get solved. They’re not our soldiers, but there are, five to 7,000, mostly young people being killed every single week,” the president told Reese in the interview. “If I could stop that and have a plane flying around the air every once in a while, it’s going to be mostly the Europeans, but we, we’d help them.”

“They, you know, they sort of need it, and we’d help them if we could get something done,” he added.

After meeting with Putin in Alaska earlier this month, a U.S. official touted a major concession from Russia, allowing “NATO-like” security guarantees for Ukraine as a part of a peace deal. The commitment does not seem it be in place as Russia is asking for an effective veto over what those security guarantees would look like.

One of the Kremlin’s red lines is European peacekeeping forces being involved with Russian officials, suggesting China as one of the security guarantors.

While the peace talks appear to be at a stalemate, the conflict has continued with Russia launching massive aerial attacks on Ukraine. On Thursday, Moscow hit Kyiv with a large missile and drone assault that killed 23 people and injured dozens of others. 

Hours after, the Trump administration approved a sale of 3,350 Extended Range Attack Munition (ERAM) missiles and 3,350 GPS units to Ukraine, part of a $825 million munitions deal to bolster Kyiv’s defensive capabilities. 

An Israeli strike on Yemen earlier this week killed the prime minister of the Houthi-controlled government and several other officials, according to the Iran-backed rebel group. 

Ahmed al-Rahawi, the prime minister and most senior Houthi official, was killed in a Thursday Israeli attack in the Yemeni capital of Sanaa, the group said in a statement on Saturday. The Houthis, designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the U.S., added that colleagues of Rahawi were also killed or injured in the attack, although it is unclear how many. 

The assault came as the Houthis’ leadership gathered for a “routine” workshop to analyze its performance over the past year, the presidency said in a statement that was broadcast on Houthi-run TV.

The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) said Thursday that a “Houthi terrorist regime military target in Sanaa” was struck. 

“The Iranian-backed Houthi regime has targeted Israel, undermining regional stability and freedom of navigation,” the IDF said on social platform X.

Despite killing al-Rahawi, the majority of the power lies with Abdul Malik al-Houthi, a politician and religious leader in Yemen.

The Houthis, one of several groups backed by Iran in the region, attacked Israel shortly after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack on the nation, which sparked the ongoing war in Gaza. Hamas, a Palestinian militant group, is also backed by Iran and the Yemeni group has vowed to support them.

The Houthis started firing missiles on behalf of Hamas shortly after the initial attack, targeting cargo ships going through the Red Sea to pressure Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to end IDF’s military operation in the Gaza Strip. Most of the ships had no affiliation with Israel. 

The attacks have disrupted international trade as some boats were forced to reroute, taking longer paths to their destination. 

The U.S. military, along with other allied nations, launched strikes on the Houthi rebels in response, seeking to prevent further attacks on the ships. President Trump ramped up the military operation in March with “decisive and powerful” strikes. The campaign ended in May, with the president saying the rebels “just don’t want to fight.” 

Al-Rahawi was appointed prime minister last year. Prior to the role, he served on the Supreme Political Council, which was formed in 2015.