The former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told a Senate panel on Wednesday that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., called C.D.C. employees “corrupt” and accused them of “killing children” during a tense private meeting with her the week before she was fired.
In a sometimes contentious hearing before the Senate health committee, Dr. Susan Monarez told senators she was fired “for holding the line on scientific integrity.” She said she refused Mr. Kennedy’s demands to fire top C.D.C. scientists and to sign off on vaccine recommendations issued by his handpicked advisory panel without seeing the data or science underlying them.
Dr. Monarez painted a picture of the health secretary as a man wedded to his own ideology and uninterested in government scientists. She said Mr. Kennedy tried to prevent her from talking to career C.D.C. experts or communicating with senators, and insisted that decisions be routed through political appointees.
“If you’re willing to sign off on decisions that are not made with the best available data and evidence, it does put at risk our children,” Dr. Monarez said. “It puts at risk others who need these vaccines, and it takes us into a very dangerous place in public health.”
Wednesday’s hearing exposed tumult at the nation’s public health agency, which long has been a target of Mr. Kennedy. At a recent Senate hearing, he defended his shake-up of the agency, saying: “We are the sickest country in the world. That’s why we have to fire people at C.D.C. They did not do their job. This was their job to keep us healthy. “
Ahead of the hearing, a spokesman for Mr. Kennedy, Andrew Nixon, disputed her account as laid out in her prepared remarks. He said Dr. Monarez was fired because she “acted maliciously to undermine the president’s agenda” and that the health secretary “is focused on restoring public trust in the C.D.C. by ensuring transparency, accountability, and diverse scientific input.”
Dr. Monarez and another former C.D.C. official, Dr. Debra Houry, described in vivid detail some of the turmoil inside the C.D.C., which has endured a wave of layoffs, a shooting at its headquarters in Atlanta that killed a police officer, and the resignations of some of its top scientific officials. Dr. Houry, the agency’s former chief medical officer, who served at the C.D.C. under four presidential administrations, said Mr. Kennedy needed to resign.
Dr. Houry told senators that C.D.C. vaccine experts were so rattled by the shooting that they are afraid to put their names on their own scientific papers. Dr. Monarez said Mr. Kennedy did not call her to express condolences; the next time they spoke was three days after the shooting, when he toured C.D.C. headquarters.
The three-hour session came as the vaccine panel, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, is preparing to meet in Atlanta on Thursday and Friday. The panel’s recommendations influence which vaccines insurance companies cover and which shots children can get without cost through the federal Vaccines for Children Program.
Dr. Monarez testified that Mr. Kennedy told her the childhood vaccine schedule would change in September and claimed that “there was no science or evidence” behind the existing recommendations. Critics, including Mr. Kennedy, have called for the C.D.C. to abandon its longstanding recommendation that infants receive hepatitis B vaccination at birth.
“I’m very nervous about it,” Dr. Monarez said about the meeting. “There is real risk that recommendations could be made restricting access to vaccines for children and others in need without rigorous scientific review.”
The hearing was convened by Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana and the chairman of the Senate health committee, who cast a crucial vote that cleared the way for Mr. Kennedy’s confirmation. A physician, he is an ardent proponent of vaccines.
Asked after the hearing if Americans should have confidence in the decision of the vaccine advisory panel if it changes the childhood vaccination schedule, he said they should not. The senator, a liver specialist, told reporters that the hepatitis B vaccine given to infants immediately after birth has brought the number of children with the disease each year down from 20,000 cases to around 20.
Insisting that he would “hold any judgment” until after senators on the health committee had a chance to hear from Mr. Kennedy, Mr. Cassidy declined to answer whether he was more persuaded by Dr. Monarez’s account or the secretary’s earlier this month before a different committee.
“I’m confident that he’ll come and confident that he’ll share his perspective,” the senator said of Mr. Kennedy.
But two other Republican doctors on the committee — Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky and Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas — expressed skepticism about the C.D.C.’s vaccination schedule and whether all the recommendations were backed by rigorous science.
“The biggest difference in philosophy that I see, is that I think the C.D.C. is the cause of vaccine hesitancy,” Mr. Marshall told Dr. Monarez. “You are the problem.”
Wednesday’s hearing was the first time during Mr. Kennedy’s tumultuous tenure that health officials who have worked under him have come to Capitol Hill to give a public assessment of his leadership. It also put on display the topsy-turvy nature of the politics of public health.
Some of the Republicans who voted to confirm Dr. Monarez accused her of lying. Three — Senators Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma, Jim Banks of Indiana and Ashley Moody of Florida — berated her for hiring Mark Zaid, a lawyer who has spoken out against President Trump, as her attorney.
Democrats, all of whom voted against her confirmation, treated Dr. Monarez like a hero. One, Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, publicly apologized.
“I had concern about your backbone, and I was wrong,” Mr. Kaine said. “And I apologize to you for being wrong.”
While Mr. Kennedy has promised “radical transparency,” both Dr. Monarez and Dr. Houry told senators that decisions on vaccine policy were made without public discussion of the science. Dr. Houry said she learned of the government’s decision not to recommend the Covid-19 vaccine for healthy children and pregnant women on social media after Mr. Kennedy posted on X.
She said she had asked for a written memorandum and data because she “couldn’t implement guidance based on a tweet.” But the data, she said, was not forthcoming. She also recounted having to respond quickly to Kennedy’s false statements disparaging vaccines.
“He said things like, ‘vaccines had fetal parts,’ and I had to send a note to our leadership team to correct that misinformation,” Dr. Houry said.
Both Dr. Monarez and Dr. Houry said they feared for the future of public health. Both said they feared the United States was not prepared for a future pandemic.
Dr. Monarez warned that if vaccines became harder to get, she worried that preventable diseases would surge back, and that American children would be harmed. The United States has already had a measles resurgence this year, and whooping cough cases are higher now than they were before the Covid pandemic.
Dr. Monarez repeatedly asserted that she was open to making changes in vaccine recommendations, but only based on data and evidence. Mr. Kennedy, she said, had another view.
She testified that on Aug. 25, Mr. Kennedy directed her to commit in advance to approving every recommendation made by the vaccine advisory panel, “without data or science.” He also directed her, she said, to dismiss career officials responsible for vaccine policy without cause. If she was unwilling to do so, she said, Mr. Kennedy told her that she should resign.
“I could have stayed silent, agreed to the demands, and no one would have known,” Dr. Monarez said. “What the public would have seen were scientists dismissed without cause and vaccine protections quietly eroded, all under the authority of a Senate-confirmed director with unimpeachable credentials. I could have kept the office, the title, but I would have lost the one thing that cannot be replaced: my integrity.”
Sheryl Gay Stolberg covers health policy for The Times from Washington. A former congressional and White House correspondent, she focuses on the intersection of health policy and politics.
Megan Mineiro is a Times congressional reporter and a member of the 2025-26 Times Fellowship class, a program for early-career journalists.
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