President Trump backs Health and Human Services Director Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s decision to fire the head of the health agency in charge of preventing disease outbreaks in the U.S., White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Thursday.
The show of support came a day after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was plunged into chaos, as director Susan Monarez, a Trump appointee and longstanding government scientist, was fired along with other officials. Monarez, who the Senate confirmed as the CDC’s new leader in July, claims through her attorneys she was fired after a disagreement about the scientific rigor of orders Kennedy was handing down. Her departure was announced abruptly on the Health and Human Services’ X account Wednesday night.
Mark Zaid and Abbe Lowell, lawyers for Monarez, said in a statement she was targeted after she refused to “rubberstamp unscientific, reckless directives and fire dedicated health experts.” The lawyers said her dismissal is symptomatic of a larger effort to undermine scientific institutions in the country for political reasons. “It is about the systematic dismantling of public health institutions, the silencing of experts, and the dangerous politicization of science,” they wrote.
Leavitt told reporters that President Trump fired Monarez after she refused Kennedy’s demand that she resign. “Her lawyers’ statement made it abundantly clear themselves that she was not aligned with the President’s vision to make America healthy again,” Leavitt said. “The President has the authority to fire those who are not aligned with his mission.”
CDC’s chief medical officer, Deb Houry, and other senior CDC leaders resigned Wednesday as well. Firing Monarez is a “dangerous” decision, said Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who called for an investigation into Monarez’s firing and urged Senator Bill Cassidy, the top Republican on the Senate’s health committee, to hold a hearing about her departure.
C.D.C. leaders have increasingly found themselves in the middle of a tug-of-war with Kennedy over his vision of health policy, particularly around vaccines. A key panel at the CDC that makes vaccine recommendations is scheduled to meet in mid-September and may vote on recommendation criteria for vaccines to protect against COVID-19, Hepatitis B, MMRV and RSV, according to a preliminary agenda. On Thursday, Cassidy urgently called for the vaccine panel’s next meeting to be postponed, saying “serious allegations” have been made about the scientific process being followed going into the meeting. “These decisions directly impact children’s health and the meeting should not occur until significant oversight has been conducted,” said Cassidy in a statement.
Read more: Trump Draws False Link Between Vaccines and Autism in TIME Interview
Leavitt said that Trump and Kennedy “are committed to restoring trust and credibility to the CDC by ensuring their leadership and their decisions are more public facing, more accountable, protecting our public health systems and restoring it to its core mission of protecting Americans from communicable diseases, investing in innovation, prevent and respond to future threats.”
Trump himself regularly touts his own efforts during his first term to accelerate production of COVID-19 vaccines during the pandemic through a program called Operation Warp Speed. But he’s so far stood by as Kennedy has worked to pare back federal vaccine guidelines and undermine well-established scientific consensus about the benefits of not only the Covid-19 vaccines, but for polio, measles and other diseases.
Kennedy Jr. raised concerns about further disruptions at the CDC on Thursday, telling Fox News the agency is “in trouble and we need to fix it.” Some people at CDC “should not be working there any more,” he said.
Kennedy turned on Monarez less than 30 days after she formally took her post. During Monarez’s swearing in ceremony on July 31, Kennedy had praised her “unimpeachable scientific credentials” and said he had “full confidence in her ability to restore the CDC’s role as the most trusted authority in public health.” His confidence in her and her scientific expertise did not survive a month.
