Former Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Susan Monarez, who was fired last week by the Trump administration, wrote Thursday that she was let go after refusing to give in to pressure to “compromise science itself.”
Monarez revealed details about her high-profile termination in a Thursday op-ed published in The Wall Street Journal. She served as the agency’s director for just 29 days before Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired her over a clash related to vaccine policy.
“During my first week as CDC director, a gunman opened fire on our Atlanta headquarters on Aug. 8,” she wrote. “Just as we began to recover, I was confronted with another challenge—pressure to compromise science itself.”
In the op-ed, Monarez said her former boss pressured her to resign or “face termination” in a tense meeting Aug. 25 after she refused to comply with some “troubling directives” from Kennedy.
One of those directives, she wrote, was to preapprove the recommendations of a “vaccine advisory panel newly filled with people who have publicly expressed antivaccine rhetoric.”
Kennedy, a longtime vaccine skeptic, has overhauled the nation’s vaccine policy in the seven months since he was confirmed as the leader of the HHS, through divisive moves such as canceling more than $500 million in grants and contracts related to mRNA vaccine development, throttling access to the COVID-19 vaccine and replacing members of the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel.
On Thursday, Kennedy will testify before the Senate Finance Committee, where he will face questions about Monarez’s firing and the multiple CDC officials who subsequently resigned in protest. Even Republicans have said Kennedy needs to answer tough questions about the state of the agency.
In June, he removed all 17 members of key independent advisory panel that helps make vaccine recommendations to the government, called the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. He quickly replaced the panel with eight new members, some of whom have expressed vaccine skepticism.
The secretary now has plans to nominate seven new advisers to the scientific committee, according to The New York Times.
Monarez wrote that it is “imperative” the panel’s recommendations are not rubber-stamped but instead “rigorously and scientifically reviewed before being accepted or rejected” to ensure the “facts can still prevail.”
“Those seeking to undermine vaccines 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,” she wrote.
“Once trusted experts are removed and advisory bodies are stacked, the results are predetermined. That isn’t reform. It is sabotage.”
Kennedy accused Monarez of lying in her op-ed during Thursday’s Senate Finance Committee hearing, when asked if he told her to rubber-stamp vaccine decisions.
“No, I did not say that to her, and I never had a private meeting; other witnesses to every meeting that we have, and all those witnesses will say, I never said that,” Kennedy told Senate Finance Committee Ranking Member Ron Wyden (D-Ore).
“So she’s lying today to the American people in the Wall Street Journal?” Wyden asked.
“Yes, sir,” Kennedy replied.
Updated: 10:56 p.m.
