Health and Human
Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed that Susan Monarez, the ousted
head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was lying about being threatened into
rubber-stamping policies she didn’t agree with.
Testifying before the
Senate Finance Committee Thursday, Kennedy was asked by Senator Rob Wyden to
respond to allegations that he had told Monarez to “just go along with vaccine
recommendations,” even though “she didn’t think such recommendations aligned with
scientific evidence.”
In a Wall
Street Journal
op-ed Thursday, Monarez claimed that Kennedy had directed her to preapprove
recommendations made by a “vaccine advisory panel newly filled with people who
have publicly expressed antivaccine rhetoric.” She wrote that she’d refused,
and in a meeting on August 25, Kennedy had pressured her to resign or “face
termination.” Days later, she was
removed.
Kennedy, who has lied
before Congress multiple
times, claimed that this
time, Monarez was lying.
“No, I did not say
that to her,” Kennedy said. “And I never had a private meeting with her. There
are witnesses to every meeting that we have, and all of those witnesses will
say that I never said that.”
“So she’s lying today to
the American people, The Wall Street Journal?” Wyden pressed.
“Yes, sir,”
Kennedy replied.
But Monarez’s
allegations don’t exactly sound outlandish. Kennedy has spent much of his
career peddling dangerous misinformation about vaccines. On Wednesday, more
than 1,000 current and former HHS employees wrote a
letter demanding that he step
down, citing his appointment of “political ideologues who pose as scientific
experts,” his refusal to be briefed by CDC experts, and his rescinding of the
FDA’s emergency use authorization for the Covid vaccine.
In her op-ed, Monarez
claimed that she had attempted to defend scientific review in the face of
Kennedy’s overhaul of the nation’s vaccine policy.
“Those seeking to
undermine vaccines use a familiar playbook: discredit research, weaken advisory
committees, and use manipulated outcomes to unravel protections that generations
of families have relied on to keep deadly diseases at bay,” Monarez
wrote.
“Once trusted experts
are removed and advisory bodies are stacked, the results are predetermined.
That isn’t reform,” she added. “It’s sabotage.”
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