A senior Health and Human Services (HHS) official is speaking out after being abruptly fired — claiming his ouster was part of a broader “coup” effort to undermine HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from within his own department.
According to a report from The New York Times, Dr. Steven Hatfill, a respected physician and biodefense expert, confirmed that he had been terminated over the weekend. While unnamed bureaucrats inside HHS allege Hatfill misrepresented himself as a “chief medical officer” and failed to “coordinate policy-making,” Hatfill says the truth is far more political.
In a phone interview, Hatfill dismissed the official narrative, calling it a “coup to overthrow Mr. Kennedy.” He alleged that Kennedy’s own chief of staff, Matt Buckham, was leading the internal push to oust Kennedy allies. Hatfill said Buckham told him the secretary “wants to go in a different direction” and demanded his resignation — which Hatfill refused, forcing the department to fire him.
Hatfill has long been one of Kennedy’s few allies inside the health bureaucracy, backing the secretary’s controversial move to cut federal funding for mRNA vaccine research — a decision that infuriated entrenched public health officials and pharmaceutical interests alike.
His firing is just the latest in a growing string of internal purges under Kennedy’s leadership. Former CDC deputy director Susan Monarez was fired earlier this year after opposing Kennedy’s vaccine policies, and Kennedy recently slashed more than 1,000 jobs at the CDC, saying he wanted to “reinvent” the agency after decades of failure and public mistrust.
