The Trump administration on Wednesday announced that Susan Monarez, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was fired because she was not “aligned” with the president’s priorities. Attorneys for Monarez say she refused to rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives. After her exit was announced, multiple high-ranking CDC officials resigned in protest.

Massachusetts Commissioner for Public Heath Dr. Robbie Goldstein was a high-ranking CDC official in the Biden administration, and spoke with GBH’s Morning Edition host Mark Herz to share his perspective on Monarez’s ouster, the resignations at the agency and what these changes might mean for residents of Massachusetts. What follows is a lightly edited transcript.

Mark Herz: What was your first reaction to hearing about this firing? I’m just going to add in, Monarez’s lawyer said she was targeted for standing up for science.

Dr. Robbie Goldstein: I think my first reaction, the first emotion I had, was sadness. These individuals — Dr. Monarez included, but in particular the four other high-ranking officials at CDC — are good scientists, they’re good people, they are good public health practitioners. I know many of them very well, and I know how committed they are to science and evidence and using that to drive public health decisions. I think there’s also a sense of anger and frustration. Public health, yes, it may be political, but it should not be partisan. We should look to public health to rely on science, to transparently display data, and to use that science, use those data to make decisions and recommendations for people across the country to keep us healthy and to keep us safe. I do worry that the turmoil — it’s a great word to use for this — the turmoil that exists in Atlanta at CDC is going to have real repercussions on the health of Americans.

Herz: What are the repercussions of these high-ranking officials resigning? There was a quote in an AP article on this from Public Citizen’s Dr. Robert Steinbrook [who] said, “The CDC is being decapitated.”

Goldstein: I think that’s an interesting analogy to make. I think more about how is this agency going to operate? How is it going to function?

If we take one of the individuals who resigned, Dr. Debra Houry, she was the chief medical officer of CDC, an incredible physician who’s worked in emergency rooms for much of her life, an advocate to take a public health approach to gun violence prevention. Her absence is going to be felt. She was an individual who led the workforce at CDC. She gave them support. She made sure that the workforce had what they needed, especially in the wake of increasing violence against public health practitioners as we saw just a few weeks ago with the shooting at CDC. She also was a scientific leader. She reviewed every article that went through the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. She made sure that the science coming out of CDC was top notch. Her absence will be felt. We won’t have that person guiding the science and guiding the workforce of the agency that should be leading public health for the nation.

I think we could have a similar story with all of the others that have resigned. Dr. [Demetre] Daskalakis ran the National Center for Immunizations and Respiratory Diseases. Dr. [Daniel] Jernigan ran the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases. These infectious diseases have real impacts. If we see viruses start to spread around our country, we need to have a federal agency as our partner to help us make decisions, make recommendations, get interventions out into the field to help protect the health of people in this country.

Herz: And these are not usually considered political appointees, right? These are people who have been working in public health, I assume, for possibly decades.

Goldstein: Yeah, none of those folks that I just mentioned were political appointees. They were all staff at CDC. They had dedicated their career to public health, not to partisan politics. They’ve lived and existed through many administrations, dating back to the Obama administration, the first Trump administration, the Biden administration, and now this Trump administration. They are not political beings. They’re public health scientists.

Herz: And you mentioned Dr. Daskalakis. He said in his resignation letter that changes at CDC will put “people of dubious intent and more dubious scientific rigor in charge of recommending vaccine policy.” And he described Monarez, who has just been fired, as “hamstrung and sidelined by an authoritarian leader.” These are extreme words for the kind of people you’re talking about, career public officials in multiple administrations.

Goldstein: I agree, and I think Dr. Daskalakis would know, he’s been there. He’s been inside, he has been part of the vaccine decision-making over the past nine months of this Trump administration. I think he’s right in calling into question what might happen next. I have had comfort in knowing that Dr. Daskalakis was at the head of the national center looking at vaccine policy. I know that he’s a true scientist. I can trust what he puts out.

I worry that the person who comes next may not have the same scientific principles, may not be as transparent with the data, may not use data to drive a decision, but instead is pushed by someone above them. That’s very worrisome. Vaccines are really important public health intervention, and we need to have an agency that can look at the data behind vaccines, the safety, the effectiveness of vaccines, make recommendations that are applicable to people all across the country and to go out and promote vaccination, not push against it.

Herz: Well, you’ve been telling residents of the commonwealth that whatever is said and done in the Trump administration about vaccines, that you have, as the leader of public health in this state, some power to make sure that what you think the science points to gets done here in Massachusetts for residents to keep them safe. Are you concerned about what’s happening at CDC? You say we need a strong federal partner. Are there limits to the power of what you can do to keep people safe?

Goldstein: Well, I think the power that I have here in Massachusetts as the public health commissioner comes from the people of Massachusetts and comes from their commitment to public health that goes back centuries. We are a first-in-the-nation public health entity. We were the first state to have a local board of health, the first state to have a statewide board of health. We were first state to require vaccination prior to school entry, way back in the smallpox days. So the power really derives from the people of the commonwealth. And I think that we should be comforted that here in Massachusetts, we have an administration that supports vaccine access. We have a Department of Public Health that is going to continue to use data and evidence to drive our recommendations. And we’re gonna do so in a way that is transparent and also in collaboration with communities. We’re gonna engage with people to make sure they understand why vaccines are so important for them.

I worry that we won’t have a federal partner in this, and there are a lot of implications of that. There are implications when it comes to insurance coverage for vaccines, which we’re trying to work around. There are applications for accessibility of the vaccines and whether the vaccines will be produced and shipped and on the shelves of pharmacies. But I think actually most importantly, there are implications in trust. We at the Department of Public Health have a lot of work to do to make sure that we maintain trust, that we build trust with communities and that they can look to us in this moment and know that what we’re doing. We are doing to protect their health and their wellbeing.