Susan Monarez, former head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, refused to bend to the Trump administration’s demands. Then she was fired.
That’s the explanation behind Wednesday’s sudden events, according to former CDC director Richard Besser.
Speaking with reporters Thursday, Besser explained that he had talked with Monarez hours before the Health Department announced her departure.
“She said that there were two things she would never do in the job,” Besser said. “She said she was asked to do both of those, one in terms of firing her leadership, who are talented civil servants like herself, and the other was to rubber stamp [vaccine] recommendations that flew in the face of science, and she was not going to do either of those things.”
Besser was concerned by her departure, he told ABC News. “She is a very principled scientist, a public servant, and having someone like that in that role gave me some hope there could be pushback against some of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s moves.”
Three top leaders at the agency resigned in the wake of Monarez’s dismissal, including former Chief Medical Officer Debra Houry, former National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases Director Demetre Daskalakis, and National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases Director Daniel Jernigan.
In June, Kennedy replaced independent medical experts on the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory panel with vaccine skeptics. Monarez was confirmed to run the CDC in late July and lasted less than a month in her position.
Monarez’s time was spent constructing guardrails for the newly reconfigured panel, including a failed attempt to make the panel’s evidence and slides publicly available, and an unsuccessful bid to “replace the federal official that oversees the committee with someone with more policy experience,” Houry told Politico.
Skirting direct questions about Monarez’s sudden departure during an interview with Fox & Friends Thursday, Kennedy insisted that the CDC was in trouble.
“We need to fix it, and we are fixing it, and it may be that some people should not be working there anymore,” he said.
With or without Monarez, Kennedy’s policies have already greatly reduced Americans’ ability to access vaccines.
Just this month, he divested $500 million from mRNA research, effectively axing 22 mRNA studies since, according to Kennedy, they “fail to protect” against “upper respiratory infections like COVID and flu.” He also deauthorized Covid-19 vaccinations for children and adults under 65, despite evidence that pregnant women and children are some of the most at-risk demographics for serious complications related to Covid infections.
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