Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), the chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, is calling on the Department of Health and Human Services’ advisory committee on immunization practices (ACIP) to indefinitely postpone a Sept. 18 meeting in the aftermath of a shakeup at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that resulted in the ouster of Director Susan Monarez.
“Serious allegations have been made about the meeting agenda, membership, and lack of scientific process being followed for the now announced September ACIP meeting,” Cassidy said in a statement.
“These decisions directly impact children’s health and the meeting should not occur until significant oversight has been conducted. If the meeting proceeds, any recommendations made should be rejected as lacking legitimacy given the seriousness of the allegations and the current turmoil in CDC leadership,” he said.
The committee helps craft vaccine policy and provides recommendations to the CDC.
Cassidy issued his statement after a White House spokesman announced that Monarez, who had clashed with Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., over vaccine policies, had been fired, despite having been confirmed by the Senate on July 29, less than a month ago.
Monarez resisted Kennedy’s request to rescind approvals for COVID-19 vaccines and declined to resign after Kennedy asked her to step down.
A White House spokesman said Wednesday that Monarez was “terminated from her positions” because she is “not aligned with the president’s agenda of Making America Healthy Again.”
Her ouster was followed by the resignations of four other senior CDC officials: Dr. Debra Houry, the CDC’s chief medical officer; Demetre Daskalakis, the agency’s top respiratory illness and immunization officer; Dan Jernigan, a senior official who helped oversee responses to infections diseases; and Jennfier Layden, who handled public health data.
Daskalakis, who headed the center that issues vaccine recommendations, said in a resignation letter that he posted on social media that the political leadership at Health and Human Services was using the CDC “as a tool to generate policies that do not reflect scientific reality and are designed to hurt rather than to improve the public’s health.”
He also criticized Kennedy for firing the previous members of the ACIP through social media and also announcing their replacements on social media.
And he criticized the work output of the new members the committee appointed by Kennedy.
“The recent term of reference for the COVID vaccine work group created by this ACIP puts people of dubious intent and more dubious scientific rigor in charge of recommending vaccine policy to a director hamstrung and sidelined by an authoritarian leader,” Daskalakis wrote. “Their desire to please a political base will result in death and disability of vulnerable children and adults.”
Kennedy removed all 17 members of the advisory committee in June.
He said at the time that “a clean sweep is necessary to reestablish public confidence in vaccine science.”
