Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. hurled insults about employees of the C.D.C. during a tense private meeting with Susan Monarez, the agency’s chief he had chosen but soon fired, Dr. Monarez told senators on Wednesday.
Mr. Kennedy called the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which he overseas, “the most corrupt federal agency in the world” and told her that “C.D.C. employees were killing children,” Dr. Monarez told senators during a health committee hearing. She testified alongside the agency’s former chief medical officer, Dr. Deb Houry, who told lawmakers she thought Mr. Kennedy should resign.
Dr. Monarez’s account provided the first public glimpse into the meeting with Mr. Kennedy, which led to her firing by the White House on Aug. 27.
Asked about Mr. Kennedy’s demeanor during that meeting, Dr. Monarez described him as “very, very upset and very animated,” and likened it to his defiant manner when appearing before the Senate Finance Committee, during which an angry Mr. Kennedy repeatedly told senators questioning him that they were “making stuff up.”
She said none of the assertions Mr. Kennedy made during the meeting were accurate, including the accusation that “hurt me most”: that “during the Covid outbreak, C.D.C. told hospitals to turn away sick Covid patients until they had blue lips.”
To that, Senator Tommy Tuberville, Republican of Alabama, said, “It’s hard to explain here, find out who’s telling the truth.”
Both Dr. Monarez and Dr. Houry painted a picture of a health secretary inordinately involved in vaccine policies but uninterested in the views of government scientists charged with assembling the data to support those policies. Dr. Monarez said Mr. Kennedy at one point instructed her not to talk to government scientists, or to senators.
Dr. Houry told lawmakers that she learned about revised Covid vaccine recommendations via social media and had asked for scientific evidence supporting them, which she never received. She told lawmakers that she could not draft detailed new vaccine guidance “based on a tweet.”
She also described how the C.D.C.’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which Mr. Kennedy reconstituted after firing all of its members, had in her view been weakened. She said representatives of medical societies had been blocked from involvement with the committee’s activities.
Both former officials said they had never briefed Mr. Kennedy on an issue. And both said they feared for the nation’s public health.
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.
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