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Kennedy Accuses Fired CDC Director of Lying to the American People in Her WSJ Op-Ed

Leah Barkoukis
Leah Barkoukis  |  September 04, 2025 1:15 PM

Susan Monarez, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director who was fired from her job last week, accused her former boss, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., of “sabotage” in his efforts to reform the agency.  

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed published Thursday, Monarez highlighted some of the challenges she faced in her 29 days as head of the agency.

After the Aug. 8 shooting at CDC's Atlanta headquarters, which tragically killed Officer David Rose, she described the pressure she faced "to compromise science itself.”

Reporters have focused on the Aug. 25 meeting where my boss, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., pressured me to resign or face termination. 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.

I’m gone now, but that effort continues. One of the troubling directives from that meeting more than a week ago: I was told to preapprove the recommendations of a vaccine advisory panel newly filled with people who have publicly expressed antivaccine rhetoric. That panel’s next meeting is scheduled for Sept. 18-19. It is imperative that the panel’s recommendations aren’t rubber-stamped but instead are rigorously and scientifically reviewed before being accepted or rejected. (WSJ)

On that point, however, Kennedy accused Monarez of lying, saying during a Senate Finance Committee hearing Thursday that he never pressured her to "just go along with vaccine recommendations even if she didn't think such recommendations aligned with scientific evidence."

When Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) said Kennedy had the opportunity to "call her a liar," he took him up on it. 

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"No, I did not say that to her," the HHS secretary insisted. 

"So she's lying today to the American people in The Wall Street Journal?" the Democrat senator asked. 

"Yes, sir," Kennedy replied.