Jeanne Marrazzo, former director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Disease, was formally terminated Thursday after months on administrative leave, after filing a whistleblower report.
Jeanne Marrazzo, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was removed from her post after she filed a whistleblower complaint against senior leaders at the Department of Health and Human Services, suggesting that she was fired out of retaliation.
In a prepared statement on Thursday, Marrazzo’s legal counsel, Debra Katz, said “there is no doubt [Marrazzo] was removed from her position as Director of NIAID in retaliation for her protected whistleblower activity.” After months of being on administrative leave, the former NIAID director was formally terminated Thursday, according to various media reports.
“My termination, unfortunately, shows that the leaders of HHS and the National Institutes of Health do not share my commitment to scientific integrity and public health,” Marrazzo said in the same prepared statement.
Marrazzo came to lead the NIAID in August 2023, overseeing the agency’s work to understand, prevent and treat infectious and allergic diseases. Under the leadership of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., however, she on many occasions objected to the “censorship of scientific research” and senior leadership’s actions to subordinate “scientific integrity to unscientific and unsupported policy preferences,” according to Marrazzo’s whistleblower complaint, filed last month.
In particular, Marrazzo took issue with the HHS’ “hostility towards vaccines” and Kennedy’s “abrupt cancellation of grants and clinical trials,” which she claimed was motivated by “political reasons.”
For standing up to the HHS’ new policies, Marrazzo claimed in her whistleblower complaint, she was removed as NIAID director and on March 31, 2025, was reassigned to the Indian Health Service. She was also placed on administrative leave, effective April 1, 2025, and was instructed to not show up for work. Since then, according to the report, Marrazzo “has been left with no duties or responsibilities,” without HHS providing her information about her reassignment—nor giving her the opportunity to inform her staff or clear out her office.
“The proof that they were removed for illegal reasons is powerful and incontrovertible,” Katz said in a Sept. 4 statement—referring also to Dr. Kathleen Neuzil, former director of the Fogarty International Center and NIH associate director for International Research—alongside a news release announcing the filing of the whistleblower complaint.
Marrazzo is hardly the only high-profile departure from HHS in recent weeks. Arguably the most public ouster has been that of Susan Monarez in August, who was the first Senate-confirmed director of the CDC for just 28 days. In a Senate hearing last month, Monarez told the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee that Kennedy claimed, without evidence, that CDC employees were endangering public health and were in the industry’s pocket.
“He said that CDC employees were killing children, and they don’t care,” Monarez said during the hearing, after being questioned by Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH). “He said that CDC employees were bought by the pharmaceutical industry. He said CDC forced [people] to wear masks and social distance like a dictatorship.”
