'Radical transparency' comes for CDC director fired by RFK Jr., Fauci, pharma-funded GOP chair

Senate health committee chair Bill Cassidy held a hearing Wednesday to demand "radical transparency" at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired its director Susan Monarez, the first director to be confirmed by the Senate, for supposedly admitting she was not "trustworthy."

But it's the Louisiana Republican, Monarez and former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci facing radical transparency for their associations, evasions and adherence to long-debunked COVID-19 dogma in the face of a wholesale re-examination of the childhood vaccine schedule under Kennedy.

Former Senate pharmaceutical corruption investigator Paul Thacker previewed the hearing by writing that pharma executives "shower[ed]" Cassidy with campaign cash when he took over the panel and that Cassidy was named among "strategic voices and allies" against Kennedy in purportedly leaked minutes from a vaccine maker lobbying group's April meeting. 

While the Biotechnology Innovation Organization denied producing or agreeing with the "strategy document," Thacker said "Monarez mirrored BIO’s lobbying strategy" by reportedly calling Cassidy to complain about Kennedy's demand that she let the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which meets this week, review vaccine harms.

Monarez melded grin and grimace throughout Wednesday's hearing, especially when Cassidy's Republican colleagues pressed her for straight answers on the abilities and tradeoffs of COVID vaccines, the necessity of the full schedule for every child starting at one day old, and most surprisingly, the names of the lawyers passing her notes in the room.

For three-and-a-half minutes, Monarez refused to publicly identify her counsel, Abbe Lowell and Mark Zaid, protesting that they were already known to be representing her, under badgering by Sen. Ashley Moody, R-Fla. Co-witness Debra Houry, who protested the firing by resigning as CDC chief medical officer, gave their names when Moody next asked her.

Monarez struggled to explain to Sen. Jim Banks, R-Ind., why she hired Zaid, whose representation of whistleblowers prompted the first impeachment trial of President Trump. She claimed she didn't know Zaid was "notorious for his anti-Trump activity," in Banks' words, and simply wanted "well-credentialed counsel" to help her understand her firing.

Lowell's client roster is stacked with Trump's opponents, including Hunter Biden in tax and gun probes and New York Attorney General Letitia James and former Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook in mortgage fraud probes.

While Lowell and Zaid told Politico their client would repeat "under oath" her Wall Street Journal accusation that Kennedy fired her for not promising to approve whatever his handpicked ACIP members recommended, Chair Cassidy didn't swear in the witnesses, blaming Ranking Member Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., for denying consent.

That caught the attention of vaccine-injury lawyer Aaron Siri, who vetted claims throughout the hearing on X and has testified twice this year before Wisconsin GOP Sen. Ron Johnson's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, on hidden COVID vaccine injuries in May and the public perception of vaccines based on "corruption of science" last week.

'Ridiculous' claim that vaccines 'can' prevent children's death

A week before the hearing, Kentucky GOP Sen. Rand Paul's office posted "freshly released emails" from 2020 that show Fauci, as part of first-term President Trump's COVID response, asking recipients of his emails to delete them after reading.

Fauci called Paul "full of s..t [sic]" for challenging Fauci's praise of New York's heavy lockdowns when its "per capita death rate" was several times higher than Texas or Florida, whose responses were lighter. He made the same "delete" request when discussing COVID origins Feb. 1, 2020 with then-National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins.

"We’ve found that Anthony Fauci was destroying records, which is a crime. He testified in front of Congress and said he wasn’t destroying records, which is also a crime," and Fauci will be subpoenaed if he doesn't voluntarily testify, Paul wrote on X on Tuesday.

The first grilling Monarez received Wednesday was from Paul, who is speaking at the Kennedy-founded Children's Health Defense conference in Texas this fall, though he mostly lectured Monarez following her short answers.

Paul bemoaned the tenor of the hearing, with Cassidy and Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, speaking before him, as "all vaccines are good" rather than reviewing the "actual science" of specific vaccines applied to different age groups.

When Monarez told Paul that COVID vaccines can reduce viral load, he reminded her his question was about transmission. "When you have reduced viral load, you will have reduced transmission," she said. (Her predecessor Rochelle Walensky warned in July 2021 that fully vaccinated people "have just as much viral load as the unvaccinated.")

Paul claimed the vaccines' ability to "interfere with transmission" had fallen to 16% since the Omicron variant's emergence, possibly referring to a June study of 2023-2024 "vaccine effectiveness" in a Journal of the American Medical Association publication.

He rebuked Monarez when she claimed vaccinations "can" reduce hospitalizations and the death rate in minors, telling her "the statistics are inconclusive" because child hospitalization is already so rare and her death claim is "ridiculous."

The CDC's ACIP decided to measure COVID vaccines' performance by antibodies after admitting it couldn't find a reduction in hospitalization or death, Paul said. 

"I can inject you with a foreign protein every week and measure antibodies," he lectured Monarez. "You'll make antibodies every time. It just means immunology works" rather than, say, COVID vaccines benefit young people more than increasing their risk of heart inflammation, which he pegged at six to eight in every 10,000 jabbed younger people.

Paul accused Monarez of refusing to fire staff who support COVID vaccination at six months old. 

"That assertion is not commensurate with the experience that I had," she responded.

Sanders interjected to let Monarez respond as Paul kept talking, asking if anyone she refused to fire opposed vaccinations for six-month-olds on the schedule and for medical evidence behind vaccinating one-day-olds against hepatitis B even if their mother was negative.

Monarez stayed silent as Paul told her "the burden's on you and the people you wouldn't fire" to show a given population needs specific vaccines at a certain age, not simply argue that "all vaccines are good or whether we live in Alice in Wonderland."

She answered that she simply refused to "pre-commit" to approving ACIP recommendations without science. 

"Untrue," Paul responded. 

Monarez said she has no idea whether the staff she was asked to fire were "pre-committed to maintaining any of the decisions that had been made" on the children's schedule, and that she was open to reviewing data.

'All of a sudden the moms and the grandmas never trust you'

"I think the CDC is the cause of vaccine hesitancy" because COVID vaccination was forced without being "proven or justified" that the benefits outweigh the risks, "and you all sat there with your hands in your pockets and you let that happen," Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kansas, told Monarez.

By mandating a hepatitis B vaccination for newborns, "all of a sudden the moms and the grandmas never trust you," he said. "You force doctors that don't agree with you to kick patients out of their clinics" because they don't want their kids exposed to vaccines tested over short periods in small populations, he said.

Marshall, an obstetrician before entering Congress, pressed Monarez on why every child should get every vaccine on the CDC schedule, which is 70-80 in a lifetime. Parents should have discussions with pediatricians, "and if it is right for that child based on the risk," the vaccine should be available to them, she said. 

"I would certainly want to know" whether reports showed children dying following vaccination, as Marshall speculated, Monarez said, while emphasizing "the data associated with those recommendations has been validated and vetted" through "science and evidence," and nearly 20 diseases are "mitigated" through the schedule.

Marshall asked why Monarez thought she could fulfill Kennedy's mission when she supports the full schedule for all children and "philosophically" differs from him. When the university president and athletic director agree the coach should go, "you need a new coach," he said.

She has worked under political appointees for nearly 20 years and "data has always been paramount" to her decisions, but "I will stand behind scientific integrity with every decision I ever make" and won't cede it to keep her job, Monarez said.