For STAT’s live blog of health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s appearance before the Senate Finance Committee, click here .

Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. denied on Thursday that he told the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to greenlight whatever policies his handpicked panel of vaccine advisers recommended before he fired her, accusing the health official of lying to the public.

Susan Monarez, who was ousted last week as CDC director after less than a month on the job, wrote in an Wall Street Journal opinion piece published Thursday that in an Aug. 25 meeting, Kennedy had directed her to “preapprove the recommendations of a vaccine advisory panel” that, as she noted, the health secretary had “newly filled with people who have publicly expressed an

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