Former high-ranking officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told senators on Wednesday that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s appointment as the nation’s top health care regulator has created an anti-scientific culture of censorship and arbitrary policy changes that are endangering Americans’ health.
At the center of lawmakers focus was former CDC Director Susan Monarez, who was ousted from the agency by Kennedy, Donald Trump’s secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), after she refused to sign off on Kennedy’s proposed changes to CDC vaccine policies.
Speaking before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, Monarez said that Kennedy had asked her to approve new vaccine recommendations without regard to “scientific evidence,” and to fire other CDC officials responsible for crafting vaccine policy “without cause.”
“He said if I was unwilling to do both, I should resign,” she testified. “I responded that I could not pre-approve recommendations without reviewing the evidence, and I had no basis to fire scientific experts.”
At one point, Monarez told the committee that Kennedy had barred her from speaking to members of Congress after she expressed concerns to senators about the secretary’s planned vaccine policies.
“Secretary Kennedy became aware of that, and he was very concerned that I had spoken to members of Congress,” Monarez said. “And he told me I was never to do it again.”
Former CDC Deputy Director for Program and Science Debra Houry — who resigned from the agency following Monarez’s dismissal — testified that Kennedy “censored CDC science, politicized its processes and stripped leaders of independence.”
Houry added in her testimony that Kennedy refused briefings from her office. “We would have loved to have had the conversations with him. I offered to two different HHS leaders that we would like to brief the secretary,” she said. “He never received that, and many times I would send emails to our leadership team to share with HHS when he did say things that weren’t scientifically correct, so that we could help support him. But again, our requests were not received to brief him,” she added.
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The former deputy director added that she feared the country would not “be prepared” for the next major disease outbreak, and noted that she had only learned of Kennedy’s changes to the CDC’s Covid-19 vaccine guidance after seeing a social media post about the policy shift limiting public access to the vaccines.
Kennedy’s assault on vaccine access and policy comes during one of the most pronounced periods of global vaccine skepticism since the medical marvels were first developed — and Americans are feeling the effects. A Tuesday report from NBC News done in collaboration with Stanford University found that “a large swath of the U.S. currently does not have the basic, ground-level immunity medical experts say is necessary to stop the spread of measles.”
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The report also found that since 2019, 77 percent of counties and local jurisdictions in the U.S. have seen a decline in childhood vaccination rates.
“The question before us is whether we will keep faith with our children and grandchildren, ensuring they remain safe from the diseases we fought so hard to defeat: polio, measles, diphtheria, whooping cough, and many others,” Monarez told senators. “Undoing that progress would not only be reckless — it would betray every family that trusts us to protect their health,” she concluded.