The firing of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director split GOP members of the Senate health committee on Wednesday, dividing them over whether President Donald Trump’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda has gone too far on concerns over vaccine safety. 

Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee Chairman Bill Cassidy (R-LA) called the hearing for the ousted director, Susan Monarez, to testify in the name of “radical transparency,” but some Republicans accused her of being dishonest about the circumstances of her departure. 

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On multiple occasions during the three hours of testimony, Monarez said that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime skeptic of vaccines, required her to “pre-approve” any of the decisions from the vaccine safety advisory committee’s meeting next month. When she refused, Trump fired her.

Monarez also testified that Kennedy attempted to block her from speaking with members of Congress about her concerns over the secretary’s attempts to change the childhood vaccine schedule, including eliminating the initial birth dose of the hepatitis B vaccine.

Several Republican members, including Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Susan Collins (R-ME), and Cassidy, were receptive to concerns from Monarez and her colleague, former CDC Chief Medical Officer Debra Houry, who resigned shortly after Monarez’s termination due to concerns that Kennedy was politicizing science. 

But several other Republicans, including Sens. Jim Banks (R-IN), Ashley Moody (R-FL), and Markwayne Mullin (R-OK), aggressively defended Kennedy’s call to fire Monarez.

A small number of Republicans on the committee were unsure about where to stand, getting lost in the he-said-she-said nature of the timeline leading up to Monarez’s termination on Aug. 27.

Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) said it’s “hard to explain, to find out who’s telling the truth, because there’s a lot of discrepancies on both sides.”

Here are the highlights on the GOP divide during the hearing:

Staged to ’embarrass the president’

Banks and Moody aggressively questioned Monarez regarding the presence of her legal counsel at the hearing, insinuating that the spectacle of a hearing on her termination was staged to embarrass Trump.

Banks was the first to highlight that Monarez’s attorneys, Mark Zaid and Abbe Lowell, are engaged in a multitude of high-profile litigation cases against the Trump administration, including representing other fired administration officials

Zaid, a defense attorney in the national intelligence arena, had his security clearance revoked by Trump in August allegedly due to his representation of a whistleblower. 

Moody characterized Zaid and Lowell, who were in the hearing room advising both Monarez and Houry, that the hearing was orchestrated to smear Kennedy and Trump.

“Are you afraid that it’s going to come unraveled, that you have this whole network of people that’s trying to embarrass the president or go after the president, and now you are joining this group?” asked Moody.

Moody also said the hearing was only orchestrated because Monarez “immediately called the chairman,” referring to Cassidy. 

Cassidy responded to Moody’s accusations by saying that “it is entirely appropriate for someone with oversight concerns to contact my office, or me, or, frankly, any of us.”

Recorded meeting between Kennedy and Monarez

Monarez made several references to three separate meetings she had with Kennedy on Aug. 25, during which Monarez said she told Kennedy, “If he could not trust me, he could fire me.”

When asked about Monarez’s termination during a Senate Finance Committee hearing last week, Kennedy said Monarez directly told him she was “untrustworthy,” which was the real cause for her termination.

Mullin aggressively questioned Monarez about the veracity of her account, saying that the meeting between Kennedy and Monarez was recorded.

“Ma’am, it was a recorded meeting, so you can testify one way, or you can prove that you’re lying or can be honest with this committee,” Mullin said. 

Cassidy later clarified that Mullin’s staff informed him Mullin was “mistaken” about the existence of the recording.

HHS did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for clarification on whether the meetings between Monarez and Kennedy were recorded or whether they would provide a copy of the recording to the press.

Career scientists shut out for political appointees 

Several questions were asked by Republicans and Democrats during the hearing about the involvement of career scientists in policymaking decisions at CDC and HHS, revealing concerns about political appointees and a lack of institutional continuity.

Houry told Murkowski that she was the last career official within the director’s office at CDC when she resigned, leaving only political appointees in the office upon her departure. 

Critics of Kennedy’s tight control over the CDC have argued that career scientists at CDC and other public health agencies provide essential expertise and institutional knowledge. 

Both Houry and Monarez told the committee that career science staff at CDC did not have the opportunity to brief Kennedy about the measles outbreak in the Southwest earlier this year that claimed the lives of two children. Instead, they said, they only briefed senior-level political staff. 

The two former CDC officials also said they asked Kennedy’s political staff several times for the opportunity to brief the secretary about various issues, but they were denied.

“This is about trust in our institutions, and this is where I feel we are really, really vulnerable right now,” Murkowski said.

Pandemic problems and the need for reform

A handful of Republicans on the committee did not aggressively question either witness but did highlight that the CDC had implemented disastrous policies during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Sen. Jon Husted (R-OH) highlighted that former CDC Director Rochelle Walensky collaborated with teachers unions to keep schools closed during the pandemic, which has had long-term learning loss repercussions. 

Husted said the school closure issue was “not science. It was politics at the expense of our youth.” 

“During this whole process, we talked a lot about that, and this lesson is clear to me, that when an agency is entrusted with science and it bows to politics, children pay the price, and we must demand accountability,” Husted said.

RFK JR. PLANNED TO CHANGE CHILDHOOD VACCINE SCHEDULE

Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) said that the CDC’s endorsement of COVID-19 vaccine mandate policies during the height of the pandemic triggered the rapid rise in vaccine hesitancy.

“I think the CDC is the cause of vaccine hesitancy, that you are the problem,” Marshall said, adding that the agency encouraged “forcing these vaccines on people that weren’t ever really proven or justified, that the benefits didn’t outweigh the risk.”