Susan Monarez, who only served 29 days as CDC director before being fired last month, performed a valuable civic function yesterday in testifying under oath before a Senate committee that established that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a dire threat to public health. He is the one who must be fired and if President Trump won’t do it, then RFK Jr. must be impeached and removed from office.
This is not a political disagreement nor is it a simple personnel matter. It is a bona fide emergency that will compound the longer it is allowed to fester. Congress already has plenty more than enough evidence to show that RFK lied to them during his confirmation and intends to wreak unnecessary death and destruction on all of us. Get rid of him now.
Monarez, a nonpolitical career professional who holds a Ph.D. in microbiology and immunology, stood up to RFK’s craziness and refused to act as a mere rubber stamp for his dangerous ideological push to orient the agency’s mission away from its mandate to safeguard the public and towards his own anti-vaccine agenda.
RFK had previously claimed that Monarez’s firing was because she wasn’t a “trustworthy person.” It seems that what he really meant was “loyal,” and even then, the loyalty he wanted was not to the American public, the scientific method or the job itself, but instead loyalty to him and his own individual vision for public health.
In any organization, you don’t necessarily want either leadership in open conflict or in total lockstep; you want leaders who can act cohesively but also challenge each other’s certainties, particularly in as high-stakes of an environment as the nation’s public health infrastructure. What RFK wanted was yes-men and yes-women. Monarez said “no” and she was promptly canned.
This testimony from Monarez is just one more element in a pile of evidence that Kennedy straight up lied under oath to senators considering his nomination and individually deceived lawmakers with reassurances that he would set his longtime vaccine opposition aside and run the department based on the best available scientific consensus and medical evidence.
Most notably, GOP Sen. Bill Cassidy, a medical doctor and the committee chairman, was personally assured that RFK would not impose his extreme views on the department’s technical and career staff — and, consequently, on the whole of the American public, which relies on the staff being able to perform their duties impartially.
It should frankly be an embarrassment to these Republican senators that they allowed themselves to be taken in by a man so open and consistent about his extreme agenda for decades, burning the goodwill of those who’d known him as an environmental lawyer and, eventually, his own famous family.
Some of the damage is clearly now done; it is already more difficult for people around the country to obtain the COVID vaccine, and today RFK’s hand-picked panel of cranks is set to meet to further torpedo the use of our most effective-ever therapeutics, vaccines. So much research has already been scrapped in ways that will manifest not just now but over the ensuing decades.
But so much more damage can still be done. If these lawmakers feel any degree of shame about having signed off on such a dangerous man who lied to their faces about his aims, they should not forget that they actually can do something about it.
Members of Congress during the Biden administration moved to impeach cabinet officials over far less, using the remedy of impeachment inappropriately to contend with what were only political disagreements. In this case, though, what Kennedy is doing is staggering malpractice on a scale that represents a clear and present danger to the lives and health of practically everyone in this country.
