Trump recently fired CDC director Susan Monarez, causing a major uproar within the organization and prompting some of her colleagues to resign in protest. Monarez was seen as a check against HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s worst impulses, and her dismissal has led to even more skepticism about the reliability of the CDC. On today’s edition of The Editors, our panelists discuss the CDC and MAHA movement’s respective image problems.
“The MAHA movement has a problem,” says Noah. “They are not arguing in a way that is replicable, that is reproducible by the people who actually want to convince skeptics. They don’t try to convince skeptics. They’re just muscling skeptics out of the administration.”
He believes these actions will “come back to bite them if they ever encounter a skeptical audience and decide to engage them honestly.”
Charlie “hate[s] everyone here. I totally understand why people dislike the CDC and everyone around it. I don’t think that it deserved to survive in its current form. I don’t think that people who lived through Covid and saw the double standards and the nonsense and the dishonesty should have just said, ‘Oh well.'” This, however, shouldn’t justify “the kook Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and his silly movement. . . . We’re now living the other side of the same coin.”
“The guy who looks really foolish right now is Senator Bill Cassidy,” Jim adds, “who was seen as a really key vote on the confirmation vote for Kennedy. . . . And when Cassidy spoke in favor of Kennedy’s nomination, he said, ‘He has also committed that he would work within the current vaccine approval and safety monitoring systems and not establish parallel systems. If confirmed, he will maintain the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices without changes. CDC will not remove statements from their website pointing out that vaccines do not cause autism.'”
But then Kennedy “undoes all of that. It’s completely clear: He just told Cassidy whatever the heck he needed to say in order to get confirmed. Now that he’s in, there’s nothing that can be done to stop him.”
The Editors podcast is recorded on Tuesdays and Fridays every week and is available wherever you listen to podcasts.