Susan Monarez, who was recently removed from her role as director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, on Thursday said she lost her job after defying a “troubling” order from Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., while decrying “a deliberate effort to weaken America’s public-health system and vaccine protections.”
“The Senate confirmed me to ensure that unbiased evidence serves our nation’s health, and for doing that, I lost my job,” she wrote in a scathing op-ed for The Wall Street Journal. “America’s children could lose far more.”
Monarez said Kennedy asked her in a meeting on Aug. 25 to swiftly endorse the recommendations of a vaccine advisory panel made up of vaccine skeptics after the health secretary replaced its 17 former members with eight hand-picked advisers earlier this year. One of them has since left the group, but Kennedy has reportedly picked an additional seven new members to join the committee.
During a hearing before the Senate Finance Committee on Thursday, Kennedy denied issuing that directive to Monarez, accusing the former CDC leader of lying.
“I did not say that to her,” Kennedy said.
In her WSJ editorial, Monarez recalled that Aug. 25 meeting, where she said she was told to resign or face being terminated.
“That meeting revealed that it wasn’t about one person or my job,” she wrote. “It was one of the more public aspects of a deliberate effort to weaken America’s public-health system and vaccine protections.”
“I’m gone now, but that effort continues,” she added.
The White House announced it fired Monarez last week because she was “not aligned with the President’s agenda of Making America Healthy Again.” At least four other CDC officials — including Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, who served as director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases — also left the agency. Monarez was replaced on an interim basis by a Kennedy ally with no formal medical training.
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Monarez, an infectious disease expert, said it was imperative to have the vaccine advisory panel’s recommendations challenged and analyzed before any assessment could be offered on its advice, describing that process as key to the CDC’s work and mission.
“The CDC can’t fulfill its obligation to the American people if its leader can’t demand proof in decision-making. If discarding evidence for ideology becomes the norm, why should parents, physicians or the public trust the CDC’s guidance?” she asked.
Monarez said public health should operate independent from politics as she warned that those seeking to sow distrust in life-saving shots “use a familiar playbook: discredit research, weaken advisory committees, and use manipulated outcomes to unravel protections that generations of families have relied on to keep deadly diseases at bay.”
“Once trusted experts are removed and advisory bodies are stacked, the results are predetermined,” she added. “That isn’t reform. It is sabotage.”
Monarez suggested that the stakes are that high that she cannot afford to keep quiet.
“If we stay silent, preventable diseases will return—as we saw with the largest measles outbreak in more than 30 years, which tragically killed two children,” she said. “If we act, the facts can still prevail.”
Earlier this week, nine former CDC leaders who served under both Democratic and Republican administrations warned that Kennedy’s policies are dangerous, while over 1,000 HHS employees are now demanding Kennedy’s resignation, accusing him of “compromising the health of this nation.”