Gray Delany was pushed out due to disagreements with other top officials over how the Department of Health and Human Services makes its announcements, according to Endpoints News.
Gray Delany, the head of the Department of Health and Human Services’ and President Donald Trump’s Make America Healthy Again agenda, has been fired.
Delany had reportedly butted heads with other officials at the agency about how announcements are made, which led to his termination, according to a Friday report from Endpoints News, citing an anonymous source familiar with the matter.
Delany’s firing came just days after Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. axed 22 mRNA vaccine contracts under the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), claiming that “the data show these vaccines fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections like COVID and flu,” though he did not provide evidence to support this.
The canceled contracts are together worth $500 million, according to the HHS announcement.
While Delany did not have a problem with the termination of these mRNA contracts—in an X post, he said Kennedy displayed “remarkable courage” in terminating the contracts—he did seem to take issue with how it was rolled out. According to Endpoints, out of frustration, Delany acted on his own and booked a spot for a top HHS advisor on the War Room show, hosted by Trump ally Steve Bannon.
Bannon, for his part, appeared to side with Delany. “Gray Delany is the only guy that, to me, had his act together,” he told Endpoints.
“It was an amazing 52 days,” Delany wrote on his X post, adding that he is “proud of the work I did to defend, justify and amplify” Kennedy’s decisions to end the HHS funding for mRNA projects.
Kennedy’s termination of the mRNA projects drew strong criticism from scientific experts, who warned that the move could undo years of scientific progress. Jerome Adams, who was surgeon general during the first Trump administration, told Axios Sunday that pulling the mRNA funding “risks stalling progress in some of the most promising areas of modern medicine.”
The contract cancellations were also shoddy, it appears, with STAT News reporting last Thursday that one of the terminated contracts had been awarded to a company that wasn’t working on an mRNA vaccine.
Under Kennedy’s leadership, HHS has started to turn its back on mRNA technology. In May, for instance, the agency terminated a $760 million bird flu vaccine contract with Moderna. Then, in June, Kennedy named one mRNA critic to his newly constituted CDC vaccine advisory panel: Robert Malone, who “has testified in front of Congress that the mRNA vaccines cause cancer and heart disease and autoimmune disease, even though it doesn’t,” former panelist Paul Offit told BioSpace in an interview that month.
