By some strange coincidence, no sooner did I write yesterday’s post about the thoroughly corrupt CDC and its recently-fired Director, Susan Monarez, than there turns up in today’s Wall Street Journal an op-ed by the same Ms. Monarez trying to justify herself and the agency with regard to HHS Secretary RFK, Jr. The headline is “Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the CDC and Me.” The sub-headline (online edition only) is “I was fired after 29 days because I held the line and insisted on rigorous scientific review.” The article is behind the Journal’s paywall, so I will provide some substantial quotes.
The theme of the piece, well-summarized in the sub-headline, is that Ms. Monarez, with the help of CDC colleagues, was fired for trying to hold the line against “pressure to compromise science itself.” The particular question in Monarez’s firing was evaluation of the efficacy and risks of the Covid vaccines. But Monarez frames the issue in lofty principles of the honest scientists against the barbarians. Excerpts:
[H]undreds of CDC employees told me the same thing: We need to take immediate steps to rebuild public trust. That’s the CDC I know: service before self. . . . If discarding evidence for ideology becomes the norm, why should parents, physicians or the public trust the CDC’s guidance?. . . . Public health shouldn’t be partisan. Vaccines have saved millions of lives under administrations of both parties. Parents deserve a CDC they can trust to put children above politics, evidence above ideology and facts above fear.
Oddly Ms. Monarez writes as if CDC exemplifies these ideals, without ever saying a word about the facts, which are that CDC, over the course of decades, completely abandoned the principles of honest science in favor of bureaucratic aggrandizement and partisanship.
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