Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has written about restoring “public trust” at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, while its former directors have warned he’s “endangering every American’s health.”
Dueling op-eds published this week have painted polar opposite pictures of what the CDC, which was created nearly 80 years ago to stop the spread of malaria, now looks like under Kennedy’s leadership.
In a piece published in The Wall Street Journal Tuesday, Kennedy said, “The CDC must restore public trust—and that restoration has begun.”
The vaccine skeptic talked about the failures of the CDC, specifically what he called its “irrational” polices during the Covid-19 pandemic, including shots for healthy children and “arbitrary” social distancing.
“Over the years it mutated from a readiness-and-response force into a sprawling bureaucracy dabbling in nearly every health issue, often duplicating work already done by other agencies of the Health and Human Services Department,” Kennedy said.
The secretary detailed his plan to “restore the CDC’s focus on infectious disease, invest in innovation, and rebuild trust through integrity and transparency,” through several priorities, including applying “gold-standard science” to every vaccine recommendation and training epidemiologists in the U.S. and abroad.
Nine former CDC directors who have worked for both Republican and Democratic administrations wrote about a much bleaker future in public health in a piece published by The New York Times Monday.
They said they were concerned about the “wide-ranging impact” that Kennedy’s decisions, culminating in the ousting of CDC Director Susan Monarez last week, “will have on America’s health security.”
Speaking of Monarez, the former directors said when she refused to “rubber-stamp [Kennedy’s] dangerous and unfounded vaccine recommendations or heed his demand to fire senior CDC staff members, he decided she was expendable.”
The Washington Post previously reported, citing unnamed sources, Monarez’s ousting came after she refused to support rescinding certain approvals for Covid-19 shots without consulting her advisers.
Monarez’s attorneys initially refuted her firing but suggested she was politically targeted. Kennedy wrote in his op-ed, “We have replaced leaders who resisted reform.”
“The loss of Dr. Monarez and other top leaders will make it far more difficult for the CDC to do what it has done for about 80 years: work around the clock to protect Americans from threats to their lives and health,” the former directors said in their op-ed.
They also mentioned the dozens of measles outbreaks this year, in which Kennedy “focused on unproven treatments while downplaying vaccines.” In Kennedy’s op-ed, he called the CDC’s response “effective” and said it was neither “pro-vax” nor “antivax.”
The former directors said CDC employees “deserve a health and human services secretary who stands up for health, supports science and has their back. So, too, does our country.”
