Washington (AFP) – US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Thursday lashed out at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a day after its director was ousted, saying the storied agency needs to be overhauled. Appearing on the conservative Fox News channel, Kennedy was asked about a statement from lawyers representing fired CDC chief Susan Monarez, who accused him of putting millions of lives at risk with his anti-vaccine agenda. He used the opportunity to attack the agency’s competence and priorities.
“President Trump has very, very ambitious hopes for CDC right now, and CDC has problems,” he said. “We saw the misinformation coming out of Covid. They got the testing wrong. They got the social distancing, the masks, the school closures that did so much harm to the American people today.” Kennedy then pivoted to attack a 1999 report from the CDC’s science journal, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, which is still available online and lists vaccination, water fluoridation, and family planning among the ten greatest public health achievements of the United States in the 20th century.
“We need to look at the priorities of the agency,” said Kennedy, claiming it suffered from a deeply embedded “malaise” that required “strong leadership” to restore gold-standard science. The appearance followed the dramatic firing of Monarez, a career scientist and civil servant who had held the top role for less than a month. “The president fired her, which he has every right to do,” White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said Thursday, adding a replacement would be announced soon. Monarez’s lawyers argue she was improperly fired, saying that as a presidential nominee, the president alone has the right to fire her, but she instead received a notice from a White House staffer.
For more than 80 years, the CDC has been central to public health, from leading the global eradication of smallpox to identifying the first clusters of HIV-AIDS and spearheading the charge against smoking. But the agency has come under fire since RFK Jr. took office. He has dismissed an independent panel of renowned vaccine experts, severely curtailed access to Covid-19 shots, and cut federal funding to mRNA vaccines, the technology credited with saving millions of lives during the pandemic.
Amidst the turmoil, five other high-ranking CDC officials also emailed their resignations, including the chief medical officer and the director of the national center for immunization and respiratory diseases, who oversaw the recent mpox response. “The agency is in trouble, and we need to fix it, and we are fixing it,” Kennedy said of the departures. “And it may be that some people should not be working there anymore.”
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