Susan Monarez, director of the Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention, is refusing an try from the Trump administration to push her out of her job. Monarez opposes unscientific insurance policies being pushed by Well being and Human Companies Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has an extended historical past of selling dangerous junk science.
The Trump administration claimed on Wednesday that Monarez had been fired after she refused to resign. However her lawyer Mark Zaid mentioned in a submit that as a result of she serves in a Senate-confirmed place, she might be eliminated solely by President Donald Trump himself.
In an earlier submit, Zaid and his authorized accomplice, Abbe Lowell, mentioned Monarez has been focused by the Trump administration after refusing to “rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives and fire dedicated health experts.” The submit additionally accused Kennedy and the division of “weaponizing public health for political gain and putting millions of American lives at risk.”
The refusal to bow to a purported firing echoes the stance of Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook dinner, who on Monday refused Trump’s try and take away her, noting that he doesn’t have the constitutional energy to take action. Cook dinner is now suing the administration.
Well being and Human Companies Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., proven in July.
Dr. Robert Steinbrook, well being analysis group director on the advocacy group Public Citizen, advised CNN, “Ousting the first Senate-confirmed CDC director weeks into the start of her tenure makes absolutely no sense and underscores the destructive chaos at RFK Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services.”
“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,” Daskalakis mentioned in his resignation letter.
Kennedy has instituted insurance policies meant to restrict public entry to lifesaving vaccines and not too long ago put in place extreme roadblocks that can closely limit the quantity of people that can obtain COVID-19 booster vaccinations.
Vaccinations have been key to counteracting the worldwide pandemic, which claimed thousands and thousands of lives, together with over 1.2 million individuals within the U.S.
Consultants have warned that the administration’s anti-vaccine insurance policies will result in chaos and mass demise. Already, the Trump administration’s efforts to purge medical specialists seem to have contributed to the unusually extreme unfold of measles in Texas earlier this yr.
Trump isn’t any stranger to mingling nonsense rhetoric and a medical disaster. Through the COVID-19 outbreak, Trump lied repeatedly and once more to the general public and pushed quack drugs and misinformation—all because the demise toll skyrocketed.
