Susan Monarez, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said Wednesday that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was “very upset” in their final meeting, in which she claimed he asked her to give blanket approval to vaccine guidance without seeing evidence to support it.
Since she was terminated at the CDC last month, Monarez has repeatedly claimed that Kennedy asked her to preapprove any recommendations that come out of the agency’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP).
Kennedy fired all 17 sitting ACIP members earlier this year, replacing them with appointees of his own, several of them well-known vaccine skeptics.
He has denied making that request of Monarez. It was during this same meeting that the secretary claims Monarez told him she was not trustworthy. Monarez said that she told Kennedy that if he couldn’t trust her then he could fire her.
Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) asked Monarez to describe that final meeting with Kennedy.
“The secretary in that morning meeting was very upset, very animated,” she replied. “And he said, with regard to that particular topic, ‘I have heard that you may not sign off on the forthcoming ACIP recommendations.’ And I said, ‘I cannot sign off on something before I see the data and the evidence,'” Monarez said.
