By Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed before the Senate on Thursday that former CDC director Susan Monarez told him she wasn’t “trustworthy” during a meeting last month, days before he fired her.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) asked Kennedy during the Senate Finance Committee hearing about claims that Monarez was asked to resign for refusing to sign off on changes to the childhood vaccine schedule.
“No, I told her that she had to resign because I asked her, ‘Are you a trustworthy person?’ And she said, ‘no,’” Kennedy responded. “If you had an employee who told you they weren’t trustworthy, would you ask them to resign, senator?”
“You stood next to her and described her as unimpeachable, and you had full confidence in her and that you had full confidence in her scientific credentials, and in a month she became a liar,” Warren shot back.
“Yeah. Well, you should ask her what changed,” Kennedy quipped, noting Warren voted against Monarez’s confirmation.
“I was afraid she was going to bend the knee to you and Donald Trump, and it looks like she didn’t bend the knee. So you fired her,” Warren responded.
Monarez’s legal team dismissed Kennedy’s testimony as “false and, at times, patently ridiculous” in a statement to The Hill.
“Dr. Monarez stands by what she said in her Wall Street Journal op-ed, and continues to support the vision she outlined at her confirmation hearing that science will control her decisions,” it added.
Monarez published an op-ed in the Journal shortly before the hearing, saying she had been “told to preapprove the recommendations of a vaccine advisory panel newly filled with people who have publicly expressed antivaccine rhetoric.”
“Reporters have focused on the Aug. 25 meeting where my boss…pressured me to resign or face termination,” she wrote. “But that meeting revealed that it wasn’t about one person or my job. It was one of the more public aspects of a deliberate effort to weaken America’s public-health system and vaccine protections.”
“Once trusted experts are removed and advisory bodies are stacked, the results are predetermined. That isn’t reform. It is sabotage,” she added.
Rep. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) continued questioning Kennedy about that meeting later in the hearing, asking a series of specific questions about what happened.
Kennedy confirmed that his new interim CDC director Jim O’Neill was at the meeting and that he had asked Monarez to fire career scientists and public health experts at the agency.
Warnock again asked Kennedy if he had demanded that Monarez “accept the recommendations of your hand-picked vaccine advisory panel without further review by career CDC scientists.”
“No, I did not,” Kennedy responded.
“Did you tell her to accept the advisory panel’s recommendations?” Warnock asked again.
“I told her I didn’t want her to have a rule that she’s not going to sign on to it,” Kennedy said.
The Hill has reached out to Monarez’s lawyers for comment.
Updated: 1:56 p.m.