Ex-CDC director set to tell senators that RFK Jr. required political sign-off on decisions, called for firings without cause

By Jacqueline Howard, CNN

(CNN) — Dr. Susan Monarez, former director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is expected to say in a Senate committee hearing this week that US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. put politics before public health when he required that all CDC policy and personnel decisions be cleared by political staff, according to her prepared testimony.

Monarez is set to appear before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions in a hearing Wednesday.

She was ousted last month, just 29 days into her tenure as CDC director, amid clashes with Kennedy over vaccine policies. She will be joined at the hearing by Dr. Debra Houry, who stepped down from her role as the CDC’s chief medical officer in protest after Monarez’s ouster.

“I was fired for holding the line on scientific integrity,” Monarez says in her prepared testimony. “I had refused to commit to approving vaccine recommendations without evidence, fire career officials without cause, or resign.”

HHS has not responded to CNN’s request for comment on Monarez’s claims.

In her prepared testimony, Monarez offers new details about her brief tenure as CDC director, including saying Kennedy issued a directive that CDC policy and personnel decisions required prior approval from political staff — a break from the practice of past administrations.

Bloomberg first reported on the prepared testimony Monday.

Monarez also says that on August 2, she learned from media reports that Kennedy had removed liaison members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP — an influential group of outside experts who advise the agency on vaccinations – essentially being blindsided by the news.

Then, “on the morning of August 25, Secretary Kennedy demanded two things of me that were inconsistent with my oath of office and the ethics required of a public official,” Monarez says. “He directed me to commit in advance to approving every ACIP recommendation regardless of the scientific evidence. He also directed me to dismiss career officials responsible for vaccine policy, without cause. He said if I was unwilling to do both, I should resign.”

Monarez says she told Kennedy that she could not “pre-approve recommendations without reviewing the evidence” and that she had no basis to fire scientific experts.

“On August 25, I could have stayed silent, agreed to demands, and no one would have known,” Monarez’s testimony says. “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.’ I could have kept the office and the title. But I would have lost the one thing that cannot be replaced: my integrity.”

Kennedy removed all 17 sitting members of ACIP in June. The committee now includes an entirely new group of experts, who are scheduled to meet Thursday and Friday to discuss Covid-19 vaccines as well as immunizations against hepatitis B and measles, mumps, rubella and varicella. Several of the new members have made unproven claims about vaccines, including one who said, without evidence, that Covid shots are causing “unprecedented levels of death and harm in young people.”

Monarez says the new composition of the committee has “raised concerns from the medical community.”

“There is real risk that recommendations could be made restricting access to vaccines for children and others in need without rigorous scientific review,” she says. “With no permanent CDC Director in place, those recommendations could be adopted. The stakes are not theoretical. We have already seen the largest measles outbreak in more than 30 years, which claimed the lives of two children. If vaccine protections are weakened, preventable diseases will return.”

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