Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. requested that then-CDC Director Susan Monarez get prior approval for personnel or policy decisions, fire some of the agency’s top vaccine officials and pre-approve any vaccine recommendations, according to a copy of Monarez’s planned testimony about her ouster that she will give to the Senate health committee on Wednesday.
Her prepared remarks, along with those of former CDC Chief Medical Officer Debra Houry, both obtained by POLITICO, contrast sharply with those of Kennedy at a hearing before the Senate Finance Committee in early September, when he said he had asked Monarez to resign because she told him she wasn’t “trustworthy.”
Monarez said she was fired in late August a month after her Senate confirmation because she would not comply with his demands. Houry, a longtime leader at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said she resigned after Monarez’s ouster because she was concerned the agency had become too politicized under Kennedy.
Wednesday’s hearing before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee will take place on the eve of a highly-anticipated meeting of the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel on Thursday and Friday in Atlanta. The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices is expected to consider changes to the hepatitis B, the combined measles, mumps, rubella and chickpenpox vaccine as well as the Covid-19 vaccines. On Monday, Kennedy added five new members to the panel, some of whom share his vaccine skepticism.
In her prepared testimony, Monarez expressed concern about what ACIP will do.
“The stakes are not theoretical,” Monarez is expected to say at the hearing. “If vaccine protections are weakened, preventable diseases will return.”
She rebutted Kennedy’s version of events in his testimony before the Senate Finance Committee, where he was sharply questioned by some Democratic and Republican lawmakers on his vaccine policy. “I told her she had to resign because I asked her, ‘Are you a trustworthy person?’ and she said ‘No,’” Kennedy said.
Kennedy, at the Finance hearing, also denied asking Monarez to pre-approve vaccine recommendations.
“Regarding trustworthiness — I cannot define that word for Secretary Kennedy … Secretary Kennedy told me he could not trust me,” Monarez said in her remarks. “I had refused to commit to approving vaccine recommendations without evidence, fire career officials without cause, or resign — and I had shared my concerns with this Committee. I told the Secretary that if he believed he could not trust me, he could fire me.”
The CDC’s outside panel of vaccine advisers is responsible for making changes to the adult and childhood vaccine schedules. Its recommendations need to be approved by the CDC director to become official. Kennedy fired all 17 previous members in June and replaced some of them with members who share his longheld suspicion of vaccines.
Houry, in her testimony, will argue that she resigned because of the influence of Kennedy over the agency.
“I resigned because Secretary Kennedy’s actions repeatedly censored CDC science, politicized our processes, and stripped agency leaders of the ability to protect the health of the American people,” Houry is expected to say.
Monarez echoed that sentiment, arguing she was asked to compromise her position as a scientist.
“On August 25, I could have stayed silent, agreed to demands, and no one would have known. What the public would have seen were scientists dismissed without cause and vaccine protections quietly eroded — all under the authority of a Senate-confirmed director with ‘unimpeachable credentials,’” Monarez’s remarks read. “I could have kept the office and the title. But I would have lost the one thing that cannot be replaced: my integrity,”
