Susan Monarez Tries To Justify The CDC And Herself

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.

“Public health shouldn’t be partisan”? Really? How is “addressing the [fake] public health consequences of the climate crisis” not partisan? How is trying to make gun control a “public health” issue so that CDC can meddle in it not partisan? How is it not partisan when you accuse everybody who doesn’t acquiesce in land acknowledgements and abandonment of meritocracy of white supremacism?

The fact is that the business of CDC for decades has been repeatedly trying to scare the people out of their wits about some health issue in order to justify more power and bigger mission and more staff and a bigger budget for CDC.

And about those “hundreds of CDC employees” who think the agency must take immediate steps to “rebuild public trust.” All of those people were there when CDC veered off into the rank partisanship of climate change and gun control and land acknowledgements and accusations of white supremacy against political opponents, let alone into supporting (if not actually mandating) anti-Covid measures with no evidentiary support like lockdowns and masking requirements. And none of them thought this was any problem, or at least not enough of a problem to speak up. There is nothing any of these people could do at this point to rebuild trust with me, and I suspect the same is true for most other Americans.

And as to the crux of the current dispute, the efficacy of the Covid vaccines: Ms. Monarez states in her piece that the “vaccines have saved millions of lives.” Really? How do you know that? You are the one who is claiming the mantle of science, so kindly show us your proof. In my view, real science demands complete skepticism about all scientific claims. For a vaccine, one would start with the results of a double-blind trial against a placebo, with adequate sample size, sufficient to falsify the null hypothesis that the placebo works as well or better. With Covid, advocates of effectiveness of the vaccines also need to address the issue that many of the most vulnerable had already died by the time the vaccines started use, which may skew the results toward a false appearance of effectiveness. And then there is the issue of side effects. I have strong reason to believe that information as to adverse side effects of the Covid vaccines has been systematically downplayed and suppressed, and that CDC has played a significant role in this suppression. Prove me wrong!

In her piece, Ms. Monarez claims that “trusted experts” on the subject of the vaccines are being “removed” from advisory bodies, and those bodies are being “stacked” with anti-vaxxers. But are the people Ms. Monarez calls “trusted experts” actually neutral and skeptical scientists, or are they rather committed vaccine advocates, let alone shills for big pharma? I don’t know the answer to that, but I certainly have no reason to trust prior CDC selections for these bodies to come to the right answer. By the way, I don’t have any reason either to trust RFK, Jr. or the people he may select for these bodies. I’ll make my own decisions, thank you.

How about, just make any relevant studies available and we will decide for ourselves. Meanwhile, we can save a lot of money by firing everybody at CDC.