Former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Susan Monarez, who was dismissed last week after less than a month in the role, accused Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. of undermining scientific integrity in the nation’s public health system.
In a Wall Street Journal editorial published Thursday, Monarez warned that Kennedy’s decision to overhaul the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) — the panel that issues vaccine recommendations — risks replacing evidence-based policy with ideology.
“Once trusted experts are removed and advisory bodies are stacked, the results are predetermined. That isn’t reform. It is sabotage,” she wrote.
Monarez said she was instructed during an August 25 meeting with Kennedy to preapprove recommendations from the newly constituted ACIP, which is set to meet later this month. The committee’s previous members were dismissed in June and replaced with individuals known for vaccine skepticism.
“One troubling directive was that I preapprove the recommendations of a vaccine advisory panel newly filled with people who have publicly expressed antivaccine rhetoric,” she wrote. “For putting evidence over ideology, I was fired.”
Monarez argued that her removal undermines the CDC’s credibility at a time when public trust is already fragile. “Parents deserve a CDC they can trust to put children above politics, evidence above ideology and facts above fear,” she wrote. “I was fired for holding that line.”
Her ouster triggered a wave of resignations, including Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, head of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. In his resignation letter, Daskalakis echoed Monarez’s concerns, writing, “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.”
Kennedy rejected the allegations during a Senate Finance Committee hearing Thursday, calling Monarez’s claims “false” and denying he ever ordered preapproval of ACIP recommendations.
The leadership upheaval follows a deadly shooting at CDC headquarters in Atlanta last month, in which a gunman blamed Covid-19 vaccines for his mental health struggles before killing a police officer. At an agency-wide meeting shortly afterward, Monarez stressed the dangers of misinformation and the urgent need to rebuild trust in science — a message she repeated in her Thursday editorial.
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