WASHINGTON, D.C. — Bipartisan leaders of a U.S. Senate committee dealing with health policy expressed alarm with the direction of the country’s top public health agencies after President Donald Trump fired the director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention and other high-level officials resigned.
Louisiana Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy — chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee — posted on social media late Wednesday that the “high profile departures will require oversight by the HELP Committee.”
Cassidy separately called on the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to indefinitely postpone its September meeting.
“Serious allegations have been made about the meeting agenda, membership, and lack of scientific process being followed for the now announced September ACIP meeting,” Cassidy wrote in a statement. “These decisions directly impact children’s health and the meeting should not occur until significant oversight has been conducted. If the meeting proceeds, any recommendations made should be rejected as lacking legitimacy given the seriousness of the allegations and the current turmoil in CDC leadership.”
Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, ranking member on the committee, called for a bipartisan investigation into the reasons Trump fired Susan Monarez as CDC director less than a month after she received Senate confirmation.
Sanders said that Health and Human Services Director Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Monarez and the handful of high-ranking CDC officials who resigned this week should be able to testify publicly about what’s happening inside the agency.
“We need leaders at the CDC and HHS who are committed to improving public health and have the courage to stand up for science, not officials who have a history of spreading bogus conspiracy theories and disinformation,” Sanders wrote.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said during a briefing that Trump had every right to fire Monarez and that he expects to pick a new nominee “very soon.”
“Her lawyers’ statement made it abundantly clear themselves that she was not aligned with the president’s mission to make America healthy again,” Leavitt said. “The secretary asked her to resign. She said she would and then she said she wouldn’t. So the president fired her, which he has every right to do.”
Kennedy is scheduled to testify before the Senate Finance Committee next week, that panel’s chairman, Idaho Republican Mike Crapo, announced Thursday.
Kennedy “has placed addressing the underlying causes of chronic diseases at the forefront of this Administration’s health care agenda,” Crapo wrote on X. “I look forward to learning more about @HHSGov’s Make America Healthy Again actions to date and plans moving forward.”
Cassidy key vote for RFK
Cassidy was an essential vote to confirm Kennedy as director of HHS, which oversees the CDC, though he expressed concerns throughout that process that Kennedy’s past statements about vaccines weren’t rooted in reputable medical research.
Cassidy said during a floor speech in February after voting to advance Kennedy’s nomination that Kennedy assured him he will protect “the public health benefit of vaccination.”
“If Mr. Kennedy is confirmed, I will use my authority of the Senate committee with oversight of HHS to rebuff any attempt to remove the public’s access to life-saving vaccines without ironclad causational scientific evidence that can be accepted and defended before the mainstream scientific community and before Congress,” Cassidy said at the time. “I will watch carefully for any effort to wrongly sow public fear about vaccines between confusing references of coincidence and anecdote.”
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