Pitting Science against Opinion

Once again, the Donald Trump steamroller has run off the road, this time over Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy’s obsession with anti-vaccine policies.

Essentially, infection disease doctor Susan Monarez was fired by RFK and then by the White House as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for — as her lawyers put it — standing up for science.

Even as the dismissal took on comic elements of trying to carry out an actual dismissal, the seriousness of the underlying dispute was evident in the immediate resignations of four other senior CDC leaders who basically accuse Team Trump of bad vaccine science, bad agency fund-cutting, bad health decisions for the nation.

The four included Debra Houry, the agency’s deputy director, Daniel Jernigan, head of infection disease work, Demetre Daskalakis, head of immunization and respiratory medicine and Jennifer Layden, who heads public health data and surveillance. As a group, they even connect their departures to what led a guy apparently upset over Covid vaccine hesitancy to shoot up the CDC headquarters last month, killing a police officer.

While Monarez refused to leave, claiming that no one but Trump himself could fire a Senate-approved appointee — prompting a late-night White House dismissal notice — there was no misunderstanding of the basic disagreement. Monarez was “not aligned with the President’s agenda of Making America Healthy Again,” and rubber-stamping Kennedy’s announced limitations on Covid vaccines — and vaccines against infectious diseases generally.

Naturally, we heard from the Monarez lawyers that RFK was “weaponizing public health for political gain.” Of course, it irked the White House that Monarez reached out to Sen Bill Cassidy, R-La., a medical doctor who has pressured Kennedy over keeping his hands off vaccine policies.

Monarez was the CDC’s second director since January, after Trump appointee David Weldon could not win Senate confirmation — over his anti-vaccine views.

One must wonder what the hiring conversation between Kennedy and Monarez was. How did Kennedy not know that Dr. Monarez would stand up for actual science when RFK was going to appoint a vaccine-review board stocked with anti-vaccine advocates?

Fighting Disease with Politics

As with the firing of Lisa Cook from the Fed board of governors, this CDC decapitation has nothing to do with skill or experience, and everything to do with obedience and loyalty to an agenda that may have nothing to do with reality.

As things stand, the CDC is leaderless, just at the outset of another season for flu and Covid, a growing measles proliferation just as schools are opening, and as tariffs and trade issues are complicating pharmaceutical production worldwide. In an Aug. 19 statement, the CDC estimated that Covid infections “are growing or likely growing in 36 states, declining or likely declining in 0 states.”

The irony here is that it is the same Trump who claims full credit for giving Big Pharma a billion dollars to jump start quick creation of a Covid vaccine in his first term, only to have appointed the nation’s most outspoken anti-vax as head of America’s health agencies — because Kennedy joined his presidential campaign.

Kennedy and his allies have long criticized the CDC as too deferential to the pharmaceutical industry and vaccine makers. Kennedy has taken steps to narrowing approval of Covid vaccines to high-risk groups, ended research funds for mRNA vaccines,  has replaced health reviewers with anti-vaxxers whose medical research is seen by peers as spotty, has said we are doing well with measles because there are only a thousand cases so far. RFK has revived a task force to scrutinize the childhood immunization schedule, and promised to unveil environmental risks, including vaccines, that boost childhood autism.

From news reports, Kennedy pushed Monarez to fire her senior staff by the end of this week, which she refused to do. Monarez said she would not support changing coronavirus vaccine policy without consulting her advisers, and the resign-or-be-fired sequence followed.

In emails reviewed by news organizations and various public remarks, the CDC leaders basically say Kennedy is not heeding either science and medicine or the available information about communicable diseases to rely instead on those who tell him what he wants to hear about alternative, unproved theories that make Americans less safe.

That sounds similar to complaints from dismissed employees in Justice, the Environmental Protection Agency, the shuttered consumer protection bureau, the Education Department and across the Trump government.

In recent weeks, the CDC has been under pressure from Kennedy’s allies to grant access to the Vaccine Safety Datalink that is managed in part by large health systems towards finding purported links between vaccines and autism. This effort is led by Davie Geier, a discredited researcher. Kennedy told a Cabinet meeting this week that his staff was likely to have a preliminary answer to the cause of autism in September.

The war between expertise and a Trump agenda with loose ties to reality rolls on.

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