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Susan Monarez was fired from her role as director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after refusing to strip staff members of their jobs.Credit: Alyssa Schukar for Nature<\/p>\n
When Susan Monarez<\/a> took the helm of the beleaguered US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in late July, she had her work cut out for her. Public trust in the agency had dropped considerably since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. And US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who oversees the CDC<\/a>, had called the agency a \u201ccesspool of corruption\u201d that needed to be fundamentally rebuilt.<\/p>\n Less than a month into Monarez\u2019s tenure, US President Donald Trump fired her. She had lost the trust of Kennedy, who only a month earlier had said he had \u201cfull confidence\u201d in her ability to lead the agency and that she had \u201cunimpeachable scientific credentials\u201d.<\/p>\n This conflict spilled into public view when each presented their version of events to US senators at separate hearings on Capitol Hill in Washington DC. Monarez was dismissed, she said, for refusing to fire top scientists at the agency or pre-approve vaccine recommendations without first considering the relevant scientific data. Kennedy testified that Monarez had told him that she wasn\u2019t trustworthy<\/a>, so he ousted her.<\/p>\n Kennedy had also told Monarez that CDC employees were \u201ckilling children and they don\u2019t care\u201d, were \u201cbought by the pharmaceutical industry\u201d and \u201cforced people to wear masks and social distance like a dictatorship\u201d, she testified. These alleged comments came after a deadly shooting at the CDC headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, soon after she became director. The gunman, who targeted the campus to protest COVID-19 vaccines<\/a>, killed police officer David Rose and shattered some 150 windows. <\/p>\n The past few months, Monarez says, have included both \u201cthe highlights of my professional career\u201d and the \u201cabsolute worst days of my life\u201d. In an exclusive interview \u2014 her first since she became CDC director \u2014 she tells Nature about the consequential decisions that cost her the job and what\u2019s next for public health in a politicized world.<\/p>\n The CDC director is an \u201cinherently political position, but that doesn\u2019t mean that it has to be politically compromised\u201d, says Monarez, who is an immunologist and microbiologist. \u201cThe CDC is far too important to just give up on.\u201d<\/p>\n Before our call, you sent me a photo that seems to be of you as a child with your father and siblings sitting on a tractor with a barn in the background. What was that about?<\/p>\n I grew up in rural America, in a family that didn\u2019t have many resources \u2014 my dad was a dairy farmer. You live without expecting to have the privileges and material possessions that so many people have. We just knew that you worked hard. You got up early and you treated people with kindness. We lived at or below the poverty line for a long time.<\/p>\n My parents, they\u2019re still alive, thankfully. But they\u2019ve never been wealthy, and they don\u2019t have the advantages of immediate access to high-quality health care, and so I see them still struggling today. When we\u2019re talking in Washington DC, we have to remember that there are millions and millions of Americans like my parents. We can\u2019t leave them behind.<\/p>\n
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