The former director for the Centers for Disease Control testified that she was fired after refusing to pre-approve recommendations from a vaccines oversight panel without consulting science or evidence.

Dr. Susan Monarez testified Wednesday morning morning before Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP), where she told committee chairman Bill Cassidy (R-LA) that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. asked her to commit to signing off on forthcoming recommendations from the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.

"Briefly in the first meeting, he asked me to commit to firing scientists or resign," Monarez said. "He asked me to pre-commit to signing off on each and one of the forthcoming ACIP recommendations, regardless of whether or not there was scientific evidence."

Cassidy, a physician who has drawn criticism for his vote to confirm Kennedy, asked the former CDC director whether she had any foreshadowing about those recommendations, but she said the HHS secretary did not discuss that in any substance.

"He just wanted blanket approval, okay, and if I could not commit to approval of each and every one of the recommendations, that would be forthcoming I needed to resign," Monarez said. "I did not resign, and that is when he told me he had already spoken to the White House house about having me removed."

Kennedy also made clear that ACIP, which will meet Thursday and Friday, would be changing its recommendations for childhood vaccines, she testified, and she told Cassidy that President Donald Trump was supportive.

"In that morning meeting he said that the childhood vaccine schedule would be changing starting in September," Monarez said, "and I needed to be on board with it ... He did say that he had spoken to the president. He spoke to the president every day about changing the childhood vaccine schedule."

Cassidy then asked whether Kennedy had asked her to speak to anyone outside of HHS, and she said that he had.

"In the second meeting that day, he indicated that one of his colleagues or collaborators, I don't know what the relationship is, was coming into town the following week, and he wanted me to meet with that person," Monarez said. "The person was named Aaron Siri."

Cassidy asked whether that was the same individual who reportedly petitioned the Food and Drug Administration to revoke approval for the polio vaccine, and she agreed that she had also seen that public reporting, but she disputed Kennedy's claim that she was biased against changing the vaccine recommendations.

"He did not have any data or science to to point to," she said. "As a matter of fact, we got into an exchange where I had suggested that I would be open to changing childhood vaccine schedules if the evidence or science were supportive, and he responded that there was no science or evidence associated with the childhood vaccine schedule, and he elaborated that CDC had never collected the science or the data to make it available related to the safety and efficacy."

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