RFK Jr. Is Compounding the CDC’s Covid Mistakes

National Review Online

Wednesday, September 03, 2025

 

There’s every reason to question the authority, wisdom, and elementary competence of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Indeed, any American who lived through its response to the Covid pandemic should be skeptical of the public-health agency.

 

The CDC’s initial poor performance might be charitably chalked up to the novelty of the coronavirus it was combating, but not its power grabs — like its assumption of the authority to impose a moratorium on tenant evictions — and nakedly political maneuverings.

 

President Biden’s choice to lead the agency, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, was forced to backtrack from her February 2021 position that “schools can safely re-open” without universal teacher vaccination. Walensky’s humiliation made it clear that the interests of teachers’ unions, not the needs of children, would be Biden’s priority.

 

As the public’s patience with pandemic protocols ebbed, the CDC tried to balance the majority’s needs against the interests of an imperious, hypochondriacal minority. In April 2021, it loosened its masking guidance to a comically modest degree by finally acknowledging that it was safe for vaccinated people to go to small outdoor gatherings. This was an admission of how cosseted the agency had become, given the extent to which most of the country was already ignoring its edicts. Under the guidance, fully vaccinated people still needed to mask indoors and in crowded outdoor settings. The unvaccinated should have, of course, considered themselves lucky they were even allowed outside.

 

Throughout the fall of 2021, parents of school-aged children lived in terror that a CDC functionary would close the schools once again in deference to the demands of teachers, union representatives, and public-health officials. Only an anti-Democratic wave in New Jersey and Virginia’s off-year elections seemed to finally convince Democrats that the perpetuation of extreme pandemic measures was an electoral loser.

 

And, in February 2022, Joe Biden announced that enforced masking would be a thing of the past. Suddenly, the CDC revised the metrics it used to recommend indoor masking.

 

All this and more is why the right is understandably suspicious of the public-health apparatus, and might welcome Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy’s brute-force shakeup of the CDC. He is ousting CDC Director Susan Monarez from the role to which the Senate confirmed her in July (Monarez is contesting her firing). In protest against her treatment, three of Monarez’s CDC colleagues resigned.

 

The problem is that all of this is clearly in service of Kennedy’s anti-vax agenda rather than in pursuit of the goal of depoliticizing the CDC and getting it to examine, fully and rigorously, its Covid errors to better prepare itself for the next pandemic.

 

Kennedy has dismissed all 17 members of the CDC’s advisory committee on vaccines, filling some of those roles with fellow vaccine skeptics. A committed promoter of unfounded theories about autism’s causes, among other kooky beliefs, Kennedy is preparing to release a report on the “root causes” of autism that he says will claim that certain medical “interventions” are “almost certainly causing autism.” According to one report, the HHS secretary’s effort to muscle Monarez into endorsing this scientifically questionable claim is what led to her dismissal, along with, reportedly, disputes over the availability of mRNA Covid vaccines.

 

In short, Kennedy is doing precisely what he has long said he would do if given the power. With the exception of his Senate confirmation hearings, when it was convenient to obfuscate, Kennedy has never been at all shy about his agenda.

 

And so he is duly substituting one set of unscientific, politically driven priorities for another at the CDC.