Establishmentarians' worst fears are being realized at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is putting Americans' health first, challenging the failed status quo, and threatening Big Pharma's apparent influence over the agency.

While there now appears to be a sizeable mutiny under way at the CDC, Kennedy has made one thing crystal clear: He's not backing down.

Frustration with Kennedy has been mounting among medical establishmentarians for months.

'Once RFK provides the other side of the story, there is no turning back for a significant portion of the country.'

There has, for instance, been a great deal of pearl-clutching over his termination of the Biden appointees on the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices whose coziness with pharmaceutical companies prompted questions about their vaccine recommendations; his removal of the COVID vaccine from the CDC's recommended vaccine schedule for healthy pregnant women and children; and his cancellation of mRNA vaccine development contracts.

This shake-up at the CDC continued last week with the White House's ouster of Susan Monarez as director — a removal her attorneys claimed was the result of her supposed refusal "to rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives and fire dedicated health experts."

Amid Monarez's futile fight to keep her job — she has since been replaced by Health and Human Services Deputy Secretary Jim O'Neill — other CDC officials threw in the towel, including Debra Houry, the chief medical officer; Daniel Jernigan, the director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Disease; and Demetre Daskalakis, the sex-obsessed homosexual "activist physician" who showed up in public wearing bondage gear and served as director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.

RELATED: How Big Pharma left its mark on woke CDC vax advisory panel — and what RFK Jr. did about it

Following this changing of the guard, over 1,000 current and former HHS staff members released a letter on Wednesday demanding Kennedy's resignation from his position as health secretary.

The Save HHS campaign's letter, whose signatories are not publicly named but have been supposedly revealed to members of Congress, claims that Kennedy "continues to endanger the nation's health" by:

• "facilitating" the removal of Monarez;
• "causing the resignations" of Daskalakis and his ilk;
• appointing Dr. Robert Malone and other experts to ACIP who have in the past raised concerns about experimental vaccines;
• rescinding the Food and Drug Administration's emergency use authorization for COVID vaccines; and
• daring to say that "trusting experts is not a feature of either a science or democracy."

The Save HHS campaign did not respond to Blaze News' request for comment.

The Save HHS campaign indicates on its website that its partner organizations include Doctors for America, National Nurses United, and the American Public Health Organization.

The scientific advisory board of the Accountability Journalism Institute is apparently also a partner.

In its petition to remove Kennedy, the AJI's scientific advisory board claimed that President Donald Trump's health secretary "poses an immediate and long-term threat to the health of the American public."

The AJI scientific advisory board's claim appears to be a stone's thrown from a glass house. After all, a member of the board and signatory of the petition is Peter Daszak — the disgraced British zoologist who was formally debarred along with his scandal-plagued organization EcoHealth Alliance in January by the HHS.

RELATED: RFK Jr. pulls plug on mRNA jabs because they 'pose more risks than benefits'

Former CDC Director Susan Monarez and ex-CDC official Demetre Daskalakis. Photo (left): Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images; Photo (right): Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty Images

Blaze News senior editor Daniel Horowitz, author of "Rise of the Fourth Reich: Confronting COVID Fascism with a New Nuremberg Trial So This Never Happens Again," noted to Blaze News, "The reason you are seeing so much mutiny against RFK Jr. is because unlike many of the Trump legal and policy changes, which can easily be changed under the next administration, CDC guidance is much more of a cultural influence straight down to individual parents and doctors."

"For years, the industry relied on an air-tight unanimity of opinion in health care and government that every vaccine was as pure as the wind-driven snow and absolutely indispensable for every baby born in this country," wrote Horowitz.

"Once RFK provides the other side of the story, there is no turning back for a significant portion of the country because ultimately it relies on the public confidence in vaccines," continued Horowitz. "It's not like immigration policies with TPS, parole, and expedited removal that the next president can just reinstate the prior policies from day one."

Kennedy noted in an op-ed on Tuesday that while the CDC "was once the world's most trusted guardian of public health" with a mission both clear and noble, "over the decades, bureaucratic inertia, politicized science, and mission creep have corroded that purpose and squandered public trust."

'The CDC must restore public trust — and that restoration has begun.'

The health secretary turned the endangerment accusation on its head, pointing out that the CDC under previous management "produced irrational policy during COVID: cloth masks on toddlers, arbitrary 6-foot distancing, boosters for healthy children, prolonged school closings, economy-crushing lockdowns, and the suppression of low-cost therapeutics in favor of experimental and ineffective drugs."

"The toll was devastating. America is home to 4.2% of the world’s population but suffered 19% of COVID deaths," added Kennedy.

The health secretary noted further that the "truth must no longer be ignored" about the downsides of vaccines, antibiotics, and therapeutics and that "infectious and chronic illness are linked."

Kennedy indicated that his ACIP housecleaning and the replacement of CDC leaders who "resisted reform" were meaningful steps toward restoring trust, eliminating conflicts of interest, and curbing "bureaucratic complacency" at the agency but that there was still much work to be done.

"The CDC must restore public trust — and that restoration has begun," wrote Kennedy. "It won't stop until America’s public health institutions again serve the people with transparency, honesty, and integrity."

To this end, Kennedy indicated that the agency will modernize systems, enhance scientific rigor, build infrastructure, and empower states and communities.

HHS communications director Andrew Nixon said in a statement to Blaze News, "Secretary Kennedy has been clear: The CDC has been broken for a long time. Restoring it as the world’s most trusted guardian of public health will take sustained reform and more personnel changes."

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