A word of caution to the Trump administration as it carries out much-needed reforms across the nation\u2019s public-health agencies: Purging the arrogance and ideology that drove insane COVID policies is a must, but Health and Human Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a terribly flawed tool for doing it.<\/p>\n
It now looks like RFK\u2019s no. 2, Jim O\u2019Neill, will (at least for now) replace Centers for Disease Control Director Susan Monarez, who abruptly got booted<\/a> Wednesday.<\/p>\n President Donald Trump tapped Monarez for the job in March; the Senate finally confirmed her just a month ago (Democrats are full-court delaying all Trump nominations) \u2014 and now she\u2019s already gone, by at least some accounts for taking issue with her boss\u2019 firing of all 17 members of the CDC\u2019s vaccine advisory committee<\/a> in June and refusing to fire CDC staff Kennedy wanted out.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Now, some of these \u201cpublic-health professionals\u201d look to be anything but. <\/p>\n For one: Demetre Daskalakis marked the Monarez firing by quitting as director of National Center on Immunization and Respiratory Diseases \u2014 yet he\u2019d already won notoriety with a high leather-and-feather-clad public profile, and his resignation letter referenced \u201cpregnant people\u201d along with one of those \u201cmy pronouns are\u201d signoffs. <\/p>\n Heavily political pressure during the pandemic pushed out a lot of genuine public-health pros who wouldn\u2019t endorse the White House\u2019s anti-science push for universal masking everywhere, endless lockdowns and mandatory, repeated jabs for all \u2014 even kids, who (barring the immuno-compromised) were never at serious risk from COVID.<\/p>\n Problem is, RFK\u2019s no great science believer himself: In particular, his decades-long fearmongering about pretty much all vaccines feeds questions and doubts even when reasonable vax-policy changes emerge from his shop.<\/p>\n