True to the spirit of America, the most catastrophic thing to happen at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this month was not the attempted mass shooting in Atlanta of the agency's public health workers, but rather the sudden firing of its newly sworn-in director, Susan Monarez, because of her belief in science, which was, until recently, a foundational tenet of the CDC.
Monarez was confirmed in July by the Senate after Trump withdrew his first pick for the job, a physician from Florida who supports anti-vaccine theories and serves as a board chairman for the advocacy group Israel Allies Foundation. Although Monarez, a microbiologist and immunologist, was the first director without a medical degree to head the agency in 70 years, the public health community was reassured by her confirmation hearing, in which Monarez stated "vaccines absolutely save lives" and "fluoride is an important component to oral health." But these are radical beliefs to hold if one's boss is Robert Kennedy Jr., a man who hates fluoride almost as much as he hates to see a dead animal left unmolested.
Monarez inherited an agency already ravaged by the Trump administration: The CDC has lost nearly a quarter of its staff and faces budget cuts and mass restructuring. In the months since RFK Jr. took the helm, many top CDC experts have stepped down in protest of his actions, such as replacing members of independent vaccine committees with his anti-vaccine cronies, and bypassing experts to end the U.S.'s recommendation that healthy pregnant women and healthy children receive COVID shots. Just this week, RFK Jr. shared his totally innocent practice of ogling other people's children and seeing "these kids that are just overburdened with mitochondrial challenges, with inflammation, you can tell from their faces, from their body movements, and from their lack of social connection, and I know that that’s not how our children are supposed to look," a statement that comes from a man with a visibly intimate relationship to inflammation.
RFK Jr. has also announced that next month he will share the findings of a "study" he led that found "interventions, certain interventions, now that are clearly almost certainly causing autism." Accordingly, the medical community fears this report will link autism to vaccines.
Given what she was up against, Monarez's brief tenure is perhaps unsurprising. She was fired after she refused to resign, on the grounds that she was "not aligned with the President’s agenda of Making America Healthy Again," White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement, per Politico. Monarez's lawyers say she was targeted: "When CDC Director Susan Monarez refused to rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives and fire dedicated health experts, she chose protecting the public over serving a political agenda," they wrote in a statement.
Monarez's firing appears to have triggered resignations from at least four more top CDC officials, including deputy director Debra Houry; Daniel Jernigan, the head of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases; Demetre Daskalakis, the head of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, and Jennifer Layden, the director of the Office of Public Health Data, Surveillance, and Technology.
In Houry's resignation letter, she wrote, "I am committed to protecting the public’s health, but the ongoing changes prevent me from continuing in my job as a leader of the agency." Daskalakis sent two resignation letters, one short one to colleagues and one longer letter in which he wrote, "I have never experienced such radical non-transparency, nor have I seen such unskilled manipulation of data to achieve a political end rather than the good of the American people."
On Thursday, RFK Jr. went on Fox & Friends to accuse the CDC of a deeply embedded "malaise," which is a fittingly medieval word for the impending changes to the agency's approach to science. RIP to vaccines; long live Lysenkoism, miasma, and black bile. Of course, the most dangerous sliver of RFK Jr.'s pseudoscience is one he has not named specifically but one that motivates all his proposed policies. As Daskalakis writes later on in his letter, "eugenics plays prominently in the rhetoric being generated and is derivative of a legacy that good medicine and science should continue to shun."
Eugenics, a long-discredited movement oriented around "improving" the genetic makeup of the human race, underlies RFK Jr.'s terrifying proposal for an autism database, his suggestion that people who take antidepressants are more likely to become school shooters, and his belief that autism "dwarfs the COVID epidemic and the impacts on our country because COVID killed old people." In a world without vaccines—which are low-risk treatments that help protect both the vaccinated and the people who are medically unable to receive vaccines—the healthy will survive, and the weaker may not. To anyone with human compassion, this would be a tragedy; to RFK Jr., this is a part of the plan. This is, as one CDC staffer told Rolling Stone, "the work of a death cult."
The agency's leadership is now conveniently vacant, to be filled with more of RFK Jr.'s unintelligible henchmen as more actual scientists realize that science is increasingly disavowed by the administration. The CDC, once our nation's most powerful bastion against disease, injury, and disability, appears to be burning to the ground. This will be a prolonged, excruciating immolation, and people will die as a result. It is tempting to write that under RFK Jr., the only thing more infectious than disease is misinformation. But, no, it's still disease.
