It is the Trump administration vs. former CDC officials over new vaccine guidelines and more.
Last week, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced a series of actions to end COVID vaccine mandates, demand more studies from the manufacturers, and end the emergency use authorization. That means COVID boosters will still be widely available for seniors and high-risk groups, but they will no longer automatically authorized for mass use.
It is the latest in a series of moves aiming to fundamentally restructure the department Kennedy says is too entrenched in bureaucracy and no longer meeting the scientific gold standard.
Staff Shakeup
As reported on Tuesday’s AM Update, HHS announced a substantial restructuring, which included consolidating and eliminating various departments, back in July. That followed Kennedy’s June dismissal of the entire Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.
That group develops and sets vaccine guidance for the nation and is the one that failed to make clear that the COVID vaccine had a real risk of causing myocarditis, particularly in teens, even though the data was available.
Amid the vaccine policy dispute, Kennedy also fired CDC Director Susan Monarez. The termination came just about a month after her Senate confirmation. Monarez’s lawyers say she was let go because she refused to “rubber stamp on scientific reckless directives and to fire dedicated health experts.” The White House, meanwhile, cited Monarez’s clear refusal to implement ‘Make America Healthy Again’ directives as the reason for her dismissal.
Four top-ranking CDC officials have resigned in the wake of Monarez’s ouster in an apparent effort to create a firestorm around Kennedy’s management of HHS. Demetre Daskalakis – who, when not posing for magazine covers in a leather pentagram harness, or taking R-rated pictures in BDSM wear, or lecturing us on how the proper term is ‘pregnant people,’ was overseeing the vaccine recommendations program – was among them.
He appeared on ABC News over the weekend to sound the alarm about a failure to follow the science. “I only see harm coming,” Daskalakis cautioned. “I may be wrong, but based on what I’m seeing… they’re really moving in an ideological direction where they want to see the undoing of vaccination; they do want to see the undoing of mRNA vaccination; they have a very specific target on COVID. But I do fear that they have other things that they are going to be working on.”
Nine former heads of the CDC – including Rochelle Walensky, who is best known for her public crying during the pandemic and telling us all how “scared” she was about the impending doom – wrote in a New York Times op-ed yesterday that Kennedy is “endangering every American’s health.”
“What Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has done to the CDC and to our nation’s public health system over the past several months, culminating in his decision to fire Dr. Susan Monarez as CDC Director days ago, is unlike anything we have ever seen at the agency and unlike anything our country had ever experienced,” the editorial claimed.
Meeting Meltdown
Last week, Secretary Kennedy announced the next meeting of the newly appointed Vaccine Advisory Committee would take place September 18 and 19. That committee is headed by Dr. Martin Kulldorff, an expert in vaccine safety and former long-time Harvard Medical School professor who says he was fired last year over his stance on COVID vaccine mandates.
Along with now-NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Kulldorff was part of the Great Barrington Project, which correctly argued against mass lockdowns early in the pandemic despite attacks from Dr. Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins.
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), who almost tanked Kennedy’s nomination when it was making its way through his Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee earlier this year, is now calling for the meeting to be canceled due to “serious allegations… about the meeting agenda, membership, and lack of scientific process being followed.”
After hearing concerns from Monarez, he said the meeting “should not occur until significant oversight has been conducted.” If it proceeds, “any recommendations made should be rejected as lacking legitimacy given the seriousness of the allegations and the current turmoil in CDC leadership,” he added.
President Trump responded on Truth Social yesterday. “It is very important that the Drug Companies justify the success of their various Covid Drugs. Many people think they are a miracle that saved Millions of lives. Others disagree,” he wrote. “With CDC being ripped apart over this question, I want the answer, and I want it NOW. I have been shown information from Pfizer, and others, that is extraordinary, but they never seem to show those results to the public. Why not???”
“I want them to show them NOW, to CDC and the public, and clear up this MESS, one way or the other,” he added. “I hope OPERATION WARP SPEED was as ‘BRILLIANT’ as many say it was. If not, we all want to know about it, and why???”
‘Radical Distrust’
On Tuesday’s edition of The Megyn Kelly Show, Lions and Scavengers author Ben Shapiro said Kennedy was put in charge of HHS for exactly the reasons the left and media are complaining about. “It is because of the radical distrust of the public authority,” he noted. And while he admitted he does not “agree with everything RFK Jr. is doing,” he said the hysterical Times op-ed illustrates how “incompetent” the ‘resistance’ is.
“Let’s say that you were going to advise them on PR… you’d say, ‘Pick the single most obvious topic where [Kennedy] is in violation of the typical understanding of science… find the thing where he sinned the worst, and then focus on that,'” Shapiro explained. “Instead, what that op-ed does is list like 10 things, and then the last thing that it lists is ‘he backed a terrible health bill that cuts Medicaid services and could deprive people’… So, now, you’re just doing politics.”
Megyn said these so-called ‘health experts’ don’t seem to understand how far their stock has fallen in the post-COVID era. “[Nine] former CDC directors? We don’t care. No one cares,” she noted. “The CDC has humiliated itself. It has lost the trust of at least half of the country… No one gives a sh-t what Rochelle Walensky thinks about what is happening at CDC.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Shapiro by tuning in to episode 1,139 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.