type: timeline_event
On January 17, 2025, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention held a critical tabletop exercise to prepare the incoming Trump administration for a potential bird flu outbreak, focusing on coordinating the distribution of H5 vaccine in the event of a pandemic. However, documents obtained by American Oversight revealed that incoming Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was not present at this crucial pandemic planning exercise, just three days before his confirmation.
The tabletop exercise was designed to ensure continuity of pandemic preparedness across the presidential transition, bringing together CDC officials and incoming administration representatives to walk through response scenarios for H5N1 bird flu. Kennedy's absence from this planning session was particularly concerning given that H5N1 had already infected 70 people in the United States, killed one person in Louisiana just eleven days earlier, and spread to over 700 dairy herds across multiple states.
Kennedy's decision to skip the CDC planning exercise was especially significant given his well-documented history of vaccine skepticism and opposition to public health emergency measures. His absence suggested either a lack of engagement with the serious public health threat posed by H5N1 or an intentional disregard for the CDC's pandemic preparedness infrastructure that he would soon oversee as HHS Secretary.
The documents indicated this was not an informal meeting but rather a structured tabletop exercise—a standard emergency management tool used to test response plans and ensure key decision-makers understand their roles in a crisis. These exercises are particularly critical during presidential transitions to ensure that incoming leaders are prepared to manage ongoing public health threats from day one.
Kennedy's absence from the January 17 exercise foreshadowed his subsequent approach to the H5N1 outbreak as HHS Secretary. In the months following his confirmation, Kennedy would cancel pandemic flu vaccine contracts, fire CDC vaccine advisory committee members, and oversee the deactivation of the CDC's H5N1 emergency response, while thousands of scientists and public health officials were removed from federal agencies.
The failure of the incoming HHS Secretary to attend a critical pandemic preparedness exercise during a active disease outbreak represented a fundamental dereliction of duty and signaled that the Trump administration's public health policy would be driven by ideology rather than scientific preparedness. This absence, coming just days after the first U.S. death from H5N1, demonstrated that Kennedy prioritized his anti-vaccine political agenda over the practical work of pandemic preparedness, even as a potentially dangerous influenza virus continued to spread through American agriculture and had begun killing Americans.