Bedlam at CDC and the rise of junk science

The official embrace of "unorthodox" health views under Donald Trump's second presidency erupted into a crisis at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, leading to Thursday's contentious Senate hearing with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Are the chickens of junk science coming home to roost?

CDC Director Susan Monarez, who was confirmed just at the end of July — and had come into conflict with Kennedy — was ousted after refusing to resign last week. Three other top CDC officials resigned in the wake of her firing.

The specific cause of the conflict between Kennedy and Monarez was the decision to limit COVID-19 vaccine availability to people over 65 or younger people with health conditions that put them at high risk. But it's not the only source of conflict. The CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices is meeting in two weeks and will discuss, and possibly vote on recommendations, not only for COVID vaccines but for the hepatitis B vaccine and the measles, mumps, rubella and varicella (MMRV) vaccine — one of the most important elements of childhood vaccination.

Kennedy overhauled the advisory committee in June when he fired all 17 members for supposed conflicts of interest and replaced them with eight new people, half of whom had expressed at least some degree of vaccine skepticism or outright anti-vaccine activists. Kennedy now plans to nominate seven new advisers to the committee, among them a cardiologist involved with a group known for its false claims about the dangers of the COVID-19 vaccine and a pediatric neurologist who has long served as an expert witness for families that believe they were harmed by vaccines. In an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Dr. Monarez writes that she was ordered to resign after she refused to preapprove the new panel’s recommendations.

Add to this Kennedy's earlier promise to announce answers on "interventions" that are causing autism — and his history of championing the debunked vaccine-autism connection — and the alarm is understandable. Will the panel vote to remove vitally important shots such as the measles vaccine from the immunization schedule?

At a Senate Finance Committee hearing Thursday, hastily convened to deal with the turmoil at the CDC, Kennedy made numerous false or dubious claims on everything from the vaccination/autism link to the supposed dangers of the hepatitis B vaccine for newborns. He had sharp exchanges not only with Democrats on the committee but with Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), a physician — who voted to confirm Kennedy in February and said that Kennedy assured him he would keep the immunization advisory committee intact.

Sen. Cassidy may well feel buyer's remorse now that the CDC looks like a place where the lunatics are running the asylum.

It’s not only at HHS and the CDC that there's uproar over anti-vaccine politics. In Florida, where the administration of populist Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has also been flirting with rebellion against "establishment" science, Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo just unveiled a plan to abolish all vaccination mandates for schoolchildren, which he equated with "slavery." What’s more, while some European countries do not mandate but only recommend childhood vaccinations, Ladapo says simply that any "informed choice" is fine.

Of course experts and "orthodox" medicine have been wrong at times. But knee-jerk skepticism, paranoia and crackpot "science" are dangerous when they spread among the public — and deadly when in power. Their rise on the right in recent years puts America at risk.

Opinions expressed by Cathy Young, a writer for The Bulwark, are her own.

By Cathy Young

Cathy Young is a writer for The Bulwark.