Susan Monarez, recently dismissed from her role as the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, issued a warning on Thursday about Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s attempts to disrupt the scientific procedure crucial for crafting significant public health advisories.
In a Wall Street Journal editorial, Monarez expressed concern that Kennedy’s decision to replace the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which recommends specific vaccines to the public, risked favoring ideology over scientific evidence.
“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 unexpectedly let go last week after a brief 29-day tenure, recounted an August 25 meeting with Kennedy, where she was instructed to approve recommendations from the newly formed ACIP panel, which was set to convene on September 18-19.
“One of the concerning orders from that meeting over a week ago was that I needed to preapprove suggestions from a vaccine advisory group composed of individuals known for their public antivaccine statements,” she penned.
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 appointed me to ensure that unbiased scientific data guides our country’s health policies, and because of that, I lost my position. America’s children stand to lose much more,” she declared.
“Parents deserve a CDC committed to prioritizing their children over politics, relying on evidence rather than ideology, and favoring facts over fear,” she remarked. “I was dismissed for maintaining that stance.”
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.”
