Sept. 10 (UPI) — Former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Susan Monarez will testify before the Senate about the organization she briefly ran.
Monarez will appear on Sept. 17 before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, along with Deb Houry, the former Chief Medical Officer and Deputy Director for Program and Science at CDC. Houry resigned her position to protest Monarez’s termination.
The two are slated to discuss their time at the CDC to offer testimony regarding their take on the state of the agency.
“To protect children’s health, Americans need to know what has happened and is happening at the CDC,” said Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., chairperson of the HELP Committee, in a press release Tuesday. “They need to be reassured that their child’s health is given priority. Radical transparency is the only way to do that.”
“[Susan Monarez] is a public health expert with unimpeachable scientific credentials,” Kennedy had said of her at the beginning of August after she was sworn into her role. “I have full confidence in her ability to restore the [CDC’s] role as the most trusted authority in public health and to strengthen our nation’s readiness to confront infectious diseases and biosecurity threats.”
However, Monarez only held her position at the CDC for about four weeks, before allegedly being pushed out because she wouldn’t echo the agenda of U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. or remove scientists from the agency because of his plans.
She was fired after refusing to resign.
“Susan Monarez is not aligned with the president’s agenda of Making America Healthy Again,” White House spokesperson Kush Desai said in a statement to media in regard to her being axed.
“Since Susan Monarez refused to resign despite informing HHS leadership of her intent to do so, the White House has terminated Monarez from her position with the CDC,” he added.
“Parents deserve a CDC they can trust to put children above politics, evidence above ideology and facts above fear,” wrote Monarez in an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal last week. “I was fired for holding that line.”
Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, who formerly led the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, and Dr. Daniel Jernigan, who headed the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, also quit the CDC as Kennedy has worked to reshape the vaccine advisory panel to meet his own vaccine policies.
Kennedy, who cancelled approximately $500 million in contracts for mRNA vaccines last month, changed the recommendations for healthy children and pregnant women to receive COVID-19 vaccinations and led the reduction of approval for updated COVID shots this fall to only cover people over 65, or younger Americans with underlying conditions, via the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, or FDA.