Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. clashed with senators Thursday over former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Susan Monarez’s assertion that she was fired for resisting unscientific vaccine recommendations, insisting her story was untrue.
The remarks set off one of the sharpest exchanges of the three-hour Senate Finance Committee hearing.
Kennedy dismissed a question from Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., about a statement Monarez made Thursday in a Wall Street Journal editorial. She wrote that she was pressured to resign or face termination at a meeting last week if she didn’t preapprove the recommendations “of a vaccine advisory panel newly filled with people who have publicly expressed antivaccine rhetoric.”
“I did not say that to her,” Kennedy said. “I never had a private meeting with her. Other witnesses to every meeting that we have, and all those witnesses will say, I never said that.”
“So, she’s lying today to the American people in The Wall Street Journal?” Wyden said.
“Yes, sir,” Kennedy said.
Kennedy later told Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., that he did not demand Monarez accept the recommendations of the panel without further review from career scientists at the CDC.
“I told her I didn’t want her to have a rule that she’s not going to sign onto it,” Kennedy said when asked whether he told Monarez to accept the recommendations.
An HHS spokesperson backed up Kennedy’s testimony, telling Axios that Monarez “was never told to preapprove anything.”
“She was asked to rely on her own team of HHS experts, who were already conducting rigorous, evidence-based reviews when she began her brief tenure,” the spokesperson said.
At another point in the hearing, Kennedy said he asked Monarez to resign.
“I asked her, ‘Are you a trustworthy person?’ and she said no,” he told lawmakers.
Attorneys for Monarez told CBS News on Thursday that Kennedy’s claims were “false, and at times, patently ridiculous.”
“Dr. Monarez stands by what she said in her op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, would repeat it all under oath and continues to support the vision she outlined at her confirmation hearing that science will control her decisions,” attorneys Mark Zaid and Abbe Lowell said.
Kennedy came under intense criticism in June after removing all 17 members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices “to reestablish public confidence in vaccine science.”
He then named several members to the panel, including Dr. Robert Malone, an mRNA researcher and critic of COVID-19 vaccines. The ACIP is set to meet later this month to consider vaccine recommendations.
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