Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will testify before the Senate Finance Committee on Sept. 4, following the ouster of CDC Director Susan Monarez and tapping of HHS Deputy Secretary Jim O’Neill as her interim replacement.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will again face U.S. Senators amid the current upheaval at the highest levels of CDC leadership.
News of Kennedy’s Senate testimony was broken by Politico on Thursday, citing two anonymous sources who added that the Secretary will come before the Senate Finance Committee on Sept. 4.
Committee Chair Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) said in a statement that Kennedy’s appearance will be about the government’s heath agenda, according to Politico, which reported that the meeting—and Kennedy’s participation in it—was already being planned before the recent high-level drama at the CDC.
The tension came to a head earlier this week when recently confirmed CDC Director Susan Monarez was fired. And it didn’t take long for the White House to name a temporary replacement. According to several media reports, HHS Deputy Secretary Jim O’Neill will serve as interim director of the CDC.
During his confirmation hearing earlier this year, O’Neill told Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana), chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) committee, that he is “very much in favor of vaccines,” according to reporting from ABC News. “I think vaccines are one of the greatest public health interventions in human history.”
O’Neill has no medical or scientific experience—most of his career has been in politics or consulting, previously working as a speechwriter in the George W. Bush administration and as a consultant with investor Peter Thiel’s foundation.
Monarez, meanwhile, has not accepted her ouster quietly. On Wednesday, Monarez’s lawyers blasted Kennedy, accusing him of “weaponizing public health for political gain” and of endangering “millions of American lives” by removing health professionals from the government. “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,” lawyers Mark S. Zaid and Abbe Lowell said in a statement Wednesday evening.
Reporting from The Washington Post on Wednesday revealed that before she was fired, Monarez had been approached by officials and lawyers from the Trump administration, as well as by Kennedy himself, to muster her support for withdrawing certain approvals for COVID-19 vaccines. According to two anonymous sources cited by the Post, Monarez refused, opting instead to consult with her advisers first.
Then, when Kennedy urged her to resign, Monarez turned to Cassidy for assistance. Cassidy pushed back on Kennedy, which further angered the Secretary.
Following Monarez’s exit from the CDC, three high-ranking officials in the agency also stepped down from their posts: Deb Houry, chief medical officer; Daniel Jernigan, director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases; and Demetre Daskalakis, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.
Daskalakis shared his resignation letter in an X post, writing, “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.”
“I have always been first to challenge scientific and public health dogma in my career and was excited by the opportunity to do so again,” Daskalakis continued. He noted, however, that seven months into the new administration, no subject matter expert from his unit has had the opportunity to brief Kennedy. “I am not sure who the Secretary is listening to, but it is quite certainly not to us.”
In his own X post on Wednesday, Cassidy said that Monarez’s ouster “will require oversight by the HELP Committee.”
