STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Coming up, the chief medical officer at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tells us why she left.
LEILA FADEL, HOST:
First, though, we hear about the CDC's former director, who Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. once praised.
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ROBERT F KENNEDY JR: I'm very happy to have Dr. Monarez aboard. She comes to us from ARPA-H. She's a tech genius and she's going to drive AI.
FADEL: She was a Trump appointee, as heard in this video. Yet within weeks, the administration fired her. Yesterday, the Senate held a hearing where Monarez explained what happened. NPR's Selena Simmons-Duffin was there.
SELENA SIMMONS-DUFFIN, BYLINE: Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, chairs the Senate health committee. He opened the hearing with a question for his fellow senators who had confirmed Monarez just weeks ago.
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BILL CASSIDY: What happened? Did we fail?
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Cassidy cast a key vote to confirm Secretary Kennedy, despite voicing concerns about his history of anti-vaccine activism. The two men seem increasingly at odds. Exhibit A, Cassidy's decision to hold this hearing and give Monarez a chance to tell her version of events. She says on August 25, Kennedy pressured her to rubber stamp vaccine policies without reviewing scientific evidence.
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SUSAN MONAREZ: He also directed me to dismiss career officials responsible for vaccine policy without cause. He said if I was unwilling to do both, I should resign.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: She said Kennedy was very upset and animated when they met that day.
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MONAREZ: He called CDC the most corrupt federal agency in the world. He said that CDC employees were killing children and they don't care. He said that CDC employees were bought by the pharmaceutical industry.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: None of which is true, she said. Senator Cassidy, who is a physician by profession, asked Monarez what Kennedy may have planned on vaccines.
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CASSIDY: Did he ever communicate he was going to change the childhood vaccination schedule?
MONAREZ: In that morning meeting, he said that the childhood vaccine schedule would be changing starting in September, and I needed to be on board with it.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Monarez wasn't on board with it. The next day, she was fired by the White House. In a statement to NPR, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services denied that changes to the childhood vaccine schedule have already been decided.
Selena Simmons-Duffin, NPR News, Washington. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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