Washington (AP) – The US Health Minister Robert F. Kennedy Jr. informed a Senate committee on Thursday that centers for disease control and prevention leader who had left the agency last week earned as a dismissal.
He criticized CDC recommendations during the Covid 19 pandemic, which was bound with blocking and masking guidelines, and claims that they “did nothing against the disease itself”.
“The people who have supervised this process that our children who have closed our schools have commissioned masks are the people who will go,” said Kennedy. He later said they deserved to be released because they didn’t do enough to control chronic diseases.
The financial committee of the Senate called Kennedy for a hearing about his plans to “make you well”, but the democratic Senator Ron Wyden said Kennedy lied when he said he had the support of US doctors.
He said Kennedy “stacked” the deck of a vaccine committee and replaced scientists with “skeptic and conspiracy theorist”.
Last week when the Trump administration fired the director of the CDC less than a month into her term. Several top CDC executives returned and left the agency in turbulence.
The repressed director Susan Monarez wrote on Thursday in Wall Street Journal that Kennedy had tried to weaken the protection of public health.
“I was told that I was supposed to recommend the recommendations of a vaccine advisory committee, which is re -filled, with people who publicly expressed the rhetoric of the Antivaccine,” wrote Monarez. “It is absolutely necessary that the recommendations of the panel are not rubberized, but strictly and scientifically checked before they are accepted or rejected.”
Kennedy told the senators that he hadn’t done such a ultimatum.
Republicans, including Senator Bill Cassidy from Louisiana, a supporter of the doctor and vaccine, will probably also press Kennedy.
When asked whether he has confidence in the Minister of Health, North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis, a Republican in the committee, said he wanted to hear from Kennedy personally.
“He has to reconcile what he said during his confirmation process with what we have seen in the past few months, especially with regard to vaccine policy,” said Tillis.
In May, Kennedy-a long-standing leader in the anti-Accacine movement-in announced that Covid-19 vaccines are no longer recommended for vigorous children and pregnant women, a step that is rejected by medical and public health groups.
In June he abruptly had an expert body that advises the government on vaccine policy. He replaced them with a hand -picked group that included several vaccine skeptics, and then closed the door to several groups of doctors who had long contributed to forming the recommendations of the committee.
According to a number of medical groups, Kennedy cannot be designed to make decisions based on resilient medical evidence. In a statement on Wednesday, the infection -grained Society of America and 20 other organizations for medical and public healthcare gave a joint explanation in which Kennedy was resigned.
“Our country needs leadership that promotes an open, honest dialogue, not a life -saving science, spread of misinformation, reverse medical advances and decimal programs that protect us,” the explanation says.
Many of the leading societies for public health and medicine, including the American Medical Association, the American Public Health Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, have condemned Kennedy’s guidelines and warn that they will enhance the rates of vaccine diseases.
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Stobbe reported from New York. Mary Clare Jalonick, the author of the Associated Press, contributed to this report.
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