Susan Monarez, who was recently fired as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned Thursday that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was actively seeking to undermine the scientific process used to make influential public health recommendations.
In an editorial published in The Wall Street Journal, Monarez wrote that Kennedy’s move to replace the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which makes suggestions about who should get certain vaccines, risked ignoring science in favor of ideology.
“Once trusted experts are removed and advisory bodies are stacked, the results are predetermined. That isn’t reform. It is sabotage,” Monarez wrote.
Monarez, who was abruptly fired last week after just 29 days on the job, described a meeting with Kennedy on Aug. 25 in which she was told to preapprove recommendations from the new ACIP panel that is scheduled to meet Sept. 18-19.
“One of the troubling directives from that meeting more than a week ago: I was told to preapprove the recommendations of a vaccine advisory panel newly filled with people who have publicly expressed antivaccine rhetoric,” she wrote.
Kennedy fired the panel’s previous members in June and replaced them with a slate of vaccine skeptics.
She added that she had “serious concerns” following the Aug. 25 meeting and was ultimately fired for putting evidence over ideology.
“The Senate confirmed me to ensure that unbiased evidence serves our nation’s health, and for doing that, I lost my job. America’s children could lose far more,” she wrote.
“Parents deserve a CDC they can trust to put children above politics, evidence above ideology and facts above fear,” she added. “I was fired for holding that line.”
Monarez said it is “imperative that the panel’s recommendations aren’t rubber-stamped but instead are rigorously and scientifically reviewed before being accepted or rejected.”
Almost immediately after Monarez was ousted, several top officials resigned in protest, including Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, who directed the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. Their resignation letters contained similar language to Monarez’s Wall Street Journal editorial, expressing concerns about their ability to safeguard public health under the secretary’s leadership.
“I am unable to serve in an environment that treats CDC as a tool to generate policies and materials that do not reflect scientific reality and are designed to hurt rather than to improve the public’s health,” Daskalakis wrote in his letter.
In a hearing Thursday before the Senate Finance Committee, Kennedy denied Monarez’s claim and said she was lying about any order related to preapproving ACIP’s findings.
The staff shakeup at the CDC follows a shooting at the agency’s headquarters in Atlanta in which a gunman fired hundreds of rounds at the building and killed a police officer on duty. The gunman blamed a Covid vaccine for his mental health issues, including depression.
At an agency all-hands meeting that addressed the shooting, Monarez — then just a week into her job — pointed to the harms of misinformation and the need to rebuild trust.
She reiterated that call in her editorial Thursday.
“Amid the trauma, hundreds of CDC employees told me the same thing: We need to take immediate steps to rebuild public trust,” she wrote. “That’s the CDC I know: service before self.”
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