Now We Know Why RFK Jr. Wanted to Fire This CDC Director

Susan Monarez, former head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, refused to bend to the Trump administration’s demands. Then she was fired.

That’s the explanation behind Wednesday’s sudden events, according to former CDC director Richard Besser.

Speaking with reporters Thursday, Besser explained that he had talked with Monarez hours before the Health Department announced her departure.

“She said that there were two things she would never do in the job,” Besser said. “She said she was asked to do both of those, one in terms of firing her leadership, who are talented civil servants like herself, and the other was to rubber stamp [vaccine] recommendations that flew in the face of science, and she was not going to do either of those things.”

Besser was concerned by her departure, he told ABC News. “She is a very principled scientist, a public servant, and having someone like that in that role gave me some hope there could be pushback against some of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s moves.”

Three top leaders at the agency resigned in the wake of Monarez’s dismissal, including former Chief Medical Officer Debra Houry, former National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases Director Demetre Daskalakis, and National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases Director Daniel Jernigan.

In June, Kennedy replaced independent medical experts on the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory panel with vaccine skeptics. Monarez was confirmed to run the CDC in late July and lasted less than a month in her position.

Monarez’s time was spent constructing guardrails for the newly reconfigured panel, including a failed attempt to make the panel’s evidence and slides publicly available, and an unsuccessful bid to “replace the federal official that oversees the committee with someone with more policy experience,” Houry told Politico.

Skirting direct questions about Monarez’s sudden departure during an interview with Fox & Friends Thursday, Kennedy insisted that the CDC was in trouble.

“We need to fix it, and we are fixing it, and it may be that some people should not be working there anymore,” he said.

With or without Monarez, Kennedy’s policies have already greatly reduced Americans’ ability to access vaccines.

Just this month, he divested $500 million from mRNA research, effectively axing 22 mRNA studies since, according to Kennedy, they “fail to protect” against “upper respiratory infections like COVID and flu.” He also deauthorized Covid-19 vaccinations for children and adults under 65, despite evidence that pregnant women and children are some of the most at-risk demographics for serious complications related to Covid infections.

Senator Lindsey Graham on Thursday threatened to slap tariffs on Norway for its sovereign wealth fund’s decision to divest from an American company reportedly complicit in Israeli human rights abuses in Gaza and the West Bank.

As part of an ongoing ethics review meant to root out investments that contribute to Israeli violations of international law, the Norwegian wealth fund announced this week that it would exclude the construction equipment manufacturer Caterpillar. The ethics council concluded, “There is no doubt that Caterpillar’s products are being used to commit extensive and systematic violations of international humani­tarian law.” Namely, “Bulldozers manufactured by Caterpillar are being used by Israeli authorities in the widespread unlawful destruction of Palestinian property,” the council found, as the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions (BDS) movement has long pointed out.

Graham threatened the fund on X Wednesday, writing, “Your BS decision will not go unanswered.” On Thursday, he specified that he hopes to “put tariffs on countries who refuse to do business with great American companies” or to refuse visas to people punishing U.S. companies “for geopolitical differences.”

“To those who run Norway’s sovereign wealth fund: if you cannot do business with Caterpillar because Israel uses their products, maybe it’s time you’re made aware that doing business or visiting America is a privilege, not a right,” Graham warned.

The intimidation tactic is unsurprising from a politician who has proven himself an unquestioning cheerleader of the Israeli government amid the atrocities it is committing in Palestine. In June, Graham summed up his foreign policy approach regarding Israel as follows: “God blesses those who bless Israel.” (And the Republican senator has been blessed abundantly by pro-Israel lobbying groups, reportedly to the tune of $1 million throughout his political career.)

This is not the first time Graham has threatened hefty punishments on countries seeking to uphold international law.

In November 2024, Graham vowed that countries would face draconian sanctions if they complied with the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes and crimes against humanity. “If you help the ICC, we’re going to crush the economy,” the senator said at the time. “Because we’re next,” he added. “Why can’t they go after Trump, or any other American president, under this theory?”

Constituents at Ohio Representative Warren Davidson’s town hall drowned him out with boos, jeers, and chants of “tax the rich” on Wednesday night. Attendees were particularly upset about Ohio’s National Guard being deployed in Washington, D.C., Davidson’s support for President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and tariffs.

“[How will you lower] the inflated levels of government spending today to a level that is sustainable and will not crush our children with debt?” Read one of the constituent submitted questions.

“Yeah great question, thank you for that. I think that—”

“Tax the rich! Tax the rich! Tax the rich! Tax the rich!” the crowd interrupted, growing louder with each chant.

The town hall later turned to the Republican representative’s support for the Trump administration’s agenda.

“Why would you vote to pass the One Big Beautiful Bill when it raises the national debt to $3.4 trillion, and hurts the poorest of Americans?” A constituent asked Davidson. The crowd applauded in support of the question.

“The One Big Beautiful Bill is a imperfect bill, but it is—it is beautiful,” Davidson answered weakly, pausing between words while the audience groaned and yelled, “Bullshit!” at him. “If we did not pass this bill, we would have faced a default on our debt. [Which is] inacceptable [sic]. Almost everyone in the room, if you pay income taxes, would’ve had your taxes increased.”

The crowd grumbled again.

“And I’d just like to know … who is in the super high income tax bracket that gets tips? No tax on tips. No tax on Social Security. These things are big wins for Americans,” Davidson continued as the crowd grew more and more irate. “And look, President Trump is doing a great job of securing the border.”

“No!” the crowd screamed, booing even more.

Davidson was a bit dismayed by his constituents’ indignation.

“I tried to basically serve the people that wanted to come have an actual town hall,” Davidson told Ohio’s Spectrum News. “It was disappointing that a lot of other people were very disruptive. So hopefully the people that endured and stayed through it all got some benefit out of it.”

Vice President JD Vance is having a temper tantrum over people criticizing the phrase “thoughts and prayers” as a suitable response to a deadly mass shooting.

MSNBC host Jen Psaki called out leaders’ lackluster response to the school shooting in Minneapolis Wednesday, drawing the ire of the vice president.

“Prayer is not freaking enough,” Psaki wrote in a post on X Thursday. “Prayers does not end school shootings. Prayers do not make parents feel safe sending their kids to school. Prayer does not bring these kids back. Enough with the thoughts and prayers.”

Vance, who is known for his emotional outbursts—both online and off—appeared to have been stewing on this argument, and slammed Psaki’s statement.

“We pray because our hearts are broken. We pray because we know God listens. We pray because we know that God works in mysterious ways, and can inspire us to further action,” Vance wrote Thursday morning. “Why do you feel the need to attack other people for praying when kids were just killed praying?”

Vance appears to be willfully misinterpreting Psaki’s criticism. The host was making the point that constituents should expect more from their leaders than some kind of rhetoric—and the “further action” Vance mentions never seems to materialize after mass shootings.

The vice president had offered his own helpless response to the deadly incident on Wednesday. “We’re at the WH monitoring the situation in Minneapolis. Join all of us in praying for the victims!” Vance wrote.

It’s worth noting that the Trump administration is already leaping into action—but not by banning guns, or doing anything that might actually prevent another mass shooting.

President Trump announced Wednesday that the White House would lower the flags to half-mast through Sunday evening. And on Thursday, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he would investigate whether antidepressants can be linked to homicidal ideation (spoiler alert: the NIH have already found no significant connection between the two).

Maybe it’s the brain worms, but Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claims he can look at a child and diagnose them with cellular difficulties.

The 71-year-old wellness conspiracist warned reporters Wednesday that America’s children are suffering from “mitochondrial challenges,” an non-clinical term that suggests Kennedy is capable of peering into a person’s cellular health at a glance.

“I know what a healthy child is supposed to look like,” Kennedy said. “I’m looking at kids as I walk through the airports today, as I walk down the street, and I see these kids that are overburdened with mitochondrial challenges, with inflammation, you can tell from their faces, from their body movements and from their lack of social connection.”

“I know that’s not how our children are supposed to look,” he added.

Kennedy then went on to lament the prevalence of autism, which he got wrong. The health secretary told the Austin crowd that one in 25 Texans have autism—a baseless overexaggeration. In reality, one in 31 people are estimated to have autism, according to data based on national averages that was released by the Autism Society of Texas.

Kennedy has waged an unscientific war on America’s public health policy since he took the reins of the Department of Health and Human Services in February.

So far, he has replaced independent medical experts on the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory panel with vaccine skeptics. He also warned against the use of the MMR vaccine during Texas’s historic measles outbreak, recommending that suffering patients instead take vitamins. And he founded his new directive for America’s health policy—the “Make America Healthy Again” report—on studies generated by AI that never existed in the real world.

His anxieties surrounding autism are particularly alarming. Kennedy is a part of a growing movement of anti-vax parents who refuse to provide their children with the same public health advantages that they received in their youth, mostly in fear of thoroughly debunked conspiracy theories that, at one point, linked autism to the jab.

The researcher who sparked that myth with a fraudulent paper lost his medical license and eventually rescinded his opinion. Since then, dozens of studies have proven there’s no correlation between autism and vaccines, including one study that surveyed more than 660,000 children over the course of 11 years.

Regardless, Kennedy’s ideologies—and his firm grip on HHS—has already eaten away at America’s vaccine access.

Just this month, he has deauthorized Covid-19 vaccinations for children and adults under 65, and divested $500 million from mRNA research, effectively axing 22 mRNA studies since,according to Kennedy, they “fail to protect” against “upper respiratory infections like COVID and flu.”