Last week offered the clearest picture yet of his plan on vaccines—and the damage it’s already causing.
Former CDC Director Susan Monarez testifies before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions on September 17, 2025. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
IF YOU WANT TO UNDERSTAND what Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is really doing as secretary of health and human services—and the danger to which he’s likely exposing the American public—look back at what happened over three remarkable days last week.
Start with Wednesday, when the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee heard testimony from Susan Monarez, the former CDC director whom Kennedy forced out of her job just weeks after she had started. It was Monarez’s first public appearance since the firing, and she had a lot to say.
Along with Debra Houry, a veteran physician and administrator who resigned as CDC medical director in protest of Kennedy’s policies, Monarez described the ways she said Kennedy was sidelining or firing anybody who might object to his widely discredited ideas about vaccination. That included, she said, the time Kennedy demanded she preemptively endorse changes in vaccine recommendations for children—a demand she says she refused.
“I was fired for holding the line on scientific integrity,” Monarez said.
That was just a warmup for Thursday and Friday, when the CDC’s official advisory committee on immunization met to consider some of those aforementioned vaccine-recommendation changes. The committee was full of Kennedy appointees he’d put there after firing the scientists who had been on the panel before. And the proceedings unfolded about how you’d expect, with familiar, scientifically questionable assertions about alleged vaccine harms.
But the meeting also stood out for its disarray. One particularly memorable sequence started at the end of Thursday’s session, when the panel prepared to vote on a resolution that would affect availability of the MMRV shot, which combines immunization for varicella (chickenpox) with immunization for measles, mumps, and rubella.
The resolution’s wording and meaning were unclear, as one panelist protested openly. The panel approved it anyway, only to hold a new vote—and reverse the decision—at the start of Friday’s session, evidently because several other panelists had also been confused.
“We are rookies,” chairman Martin Kulldorff acknowledged in his opening remarks Friday—which perhaps understated things, given that five of the twelve members hadn’t even been named until four days before.
The upshot of that MMRV debate is that few children are likely to get the combined shot anymore. And while that’s not earth-shattering, because most kids already get two separate shots anyway, the decision along with the rest of the week’s developments were the clearest sign yet of Kennedy’s true intentions. Although he insists he is not anti-vax—that he simply wants to promote choice, and to uphold “gold-standard science”—he keeps finding ways to make vaccines less accessible and, in so doing, to reduce vaccination rates overall.
But last week showcased another, equally important side of Kennedy’s management: the way he is eliminating the people and dispensing with the procedures that allow agencies like the CDC to carry out their basic functions in a transparent, scientifically sound way. The effect isn’t so much to realign priorities as it is to unleash chaos. But that can still be corrosive to the government’s credibility—and hazardous to the people who depend on it.
STRICTLY SPEAKING, little of what Monarez said on Wednesday was new. The basic outlines of her saga as she remembers it—that she’d refused to fall in line with Kennedy’s vaccine directives and refused to fire career scientists like Houry—were already out there, thanks to news reporting and a short opinion piece Monarez had written for the Wall Street Journal a week before.
But the versions of the stories that Monarez and Houry told over the course of their nearly three-hour testimony were more detailed and vivid. Together, they painted a picture of a temperamental, controlling, and downright ignorant cabinet secretary that at any other time—and in any other administration—would have created a political firestorm.1
During the Texas measles outbreak, Monarez said, neither she nor any of the career CDC scientists briefed Kennedy—something highly unusual for any outbreak, let alone one that had resulted in the first child measles deaths in decades. But the outbreak still kept her busy, in part because Kennedy was putting out so many false statements about vaccines.
“He said things like ‘vaccines had fetal parts,’” Monarez said, “and I had to send a note to our leadership team to correct that misinformation.”
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