Susan Monarez, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is refusing an attempt from the Trump administration to push her out of her job. Monarez opposes unscientific policies being pushed by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has a long history of promoting harmful junk science.
The Trump administration claimed on Wednesday that Monarez had been fired after she refused to resign. But her lawyer Mark Zaid said in a post that because she serves in a Senate-confirmed position, she can be removed only by President Donald Trump himself.
In an earlier post, Zaid and his legal partner, Abbe Lowell, said Monarez has been targeted by the Trump administration after refusing to “rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives and fire dedicated health experts.” The post also accused Kennedy and the department of “weaponizing public health for political gain and putting millions of American lives at risk.”
The refusal to bow to a purported firing echoes the stance of Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, who on Monday refused Trump’s attempt to remove her, noting that he does not have the constitutional power to do so. Cook is now suing the administration.
Dr. Robert Steinbrook, health research group director at the advocacy group Public Citizen, told CNN, “Ousting the first Senate-confirmed CDC director weeks into the start of her tenure makes absolutely no sense and underscores the destructive chaos at RFK Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services.”
Following the administration’s statement on Monarez, at least three top CDC officials said they were quitting the agency. They include Dr. Debra Houry, the CDC’s chief medical officer, as well as Drs. Dan Jernigan and Demetre Daskalakis, both directors of agencies at the CDC.
“I am unable to serve in an environment that treats CDC as a tool to generate policies and materials that do not reflect scientific reality and are designed to hurt rather than to improve the public’s health,” Daskalakis said in his resignation letter.
Kennedy has instituted policies meant to limit public access to lifesaving vaccines and recently put in place severe roadblocks that will heavily restrict the number of people who can receive COVID-19 booster vaccinations.
Vaccinations were key to counteracting the global pandemic, which claimed millions of lives, including over 1.2 million people in the U.S.
Experts have warned that the administration’s anti-vaccine policies will lead to chaos and mass death. Already, the Trump administration’s efforts to purge medical experts appear to have contributed to the unusually severe spread of measles in Texas earlier this year.
Trump is no stranger to mingling nonsense rhetoric and a medical crisis. During the COVID-19 outbreak, Trump lied again and again and again to the public and pushed quack medicine and misinformation—all as the death toll skyrocketed.