Ousted CDC Chief Accuses Kennedy of Vaccine 'Sabotage'

Susan Monarez lasted only 29 days in her job as head of the CDC before being fired last week. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Monarez writes that she lost her job because she refused to go along with health secretary Robert F. Kennedy's plan to "compromise science." Specifically, "I was told to preapprove the recommendations of a vaccine advisory panel newly filled with people who have publicly expressed antivaccine rhetoric." That panel meets later this month, and Monarez warned that their recommendations should not be rubber-stamped—they need rigorous scientific scrutiny given that vaccines "have saved millions of lives."

• "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. Once trusted experts are removed and advisory bodies are stacked, the results are predetermined. That isn't reform. It is sabotage."
• Read the full op-ed, in which Monarez argues that "public health shouldn't be partisan."
• Kennedy, meanwhile, appears before a Senate panel on Thursday, and the Washington Post has a preview.