As CDC Spirals Into Chaos, Fox Spins For Bobby Kennedy
The hosts of Fox News’ Fox & Friends are tryng to help Robert F. Kennedy Jr. clean up the mess caused by the purge of top leaders from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, downplaying the agency’s crisis while serving up softball questions to the Department of Health and Human Services secretary in a morning interview last Thursday.
The White House said that it had fired CDC Director Susan Monarez, just a month after her confirmation by the U.S. Senate. The Washington Post reported that Kennedy, who was a notorious antivaccine activist before his appointment at HHS, had demanded Monarez’s resignation after she declined to say that she would “support rescinding certain approvals for coronavirus vaccines.” At least three senior CDC officials announced their resignations following her dismissal, including the agency’s chief medical officer and its top scientists overseeing vaccines and emerging infectious diseases.
Fox bears significant responsibility for Kennedy’s ongoing dismantling of U.S. health agencies and their work. The network’s stars helped mainstream antivaccine sentiment within the GOP, elevated Kennedy during his 2024 presidential campaign as part of a strategy to return President Donald Trump to the White House, and greased the skids for Kennedy’s ascension to the pinnacle of the U.S. health bureaucracy. They even assured their viewers, in the words of Fox & Friends co-host Ainsley Earhardt, that Kennedy was “not going to take away vaccines.”
But rather than treating Kennedy’s CDC purge as an off-ramp, Fox responded by doubling down on its support.
Plenty of reporters surely wanted to speak to Kennedy after he pushed out the CDC director then watched other agency leaders leave. But it was the co-hosts of Fox & Friends that got the opportunity, and it’s obvious why — they were willing to treat the exodus as a minor story. Indeed, Brian Kilmeade’s promo focused on an entirely different topic.
“RFK Jr. is taking on the chronic disease epidemic and how he wants to change medical schools to make America healthy again,” Kilmeade said. “The HHS secretary will deal with that — and all his staff changes — coming your way.”
That was also the tenor of the interview.
Kennedy fielded nearly four minutes of questions about Wednesday’s mass shooting at a Minnesota Catholic school before guest host Emily Compagno finally raised the issue of Monarez’s ouster.
But Compagno did not mention the reason for Monarez’s dismissal or the number of CDC officials who had subsequently resigned, instead asking: “The CDC director was fired after refusing to resign, as her lawyers accuse you, sir, of putting millions of lives at risk, as the CDC vaccine chief slammed in a resignation post. What are your thoughts on that?”
Kennedy responded that “it would be inappropriate for me to comment on a personnel issue” before pivoting to critique the CDC’s praise of vaccines and its need for “strong leadership” that “will be able to execute on President Trump's broad ambitions.”
Kilmeade then read from a statement criticizing Kennedy from Monarez’s lawyers and noted two of the other CDC resignations before adding, “Is this something that’s caught you by surprise? What’s your reaction to people that are getting a little worried?”
Kennedy responded: “I think that no, it has not caught us by surprise. Again, I cannot comment on personnel issues, but the agency is in trouble, and we need to fix it, and we are fixing it, and it may be that some people should not be working there anymore.”
And with that, discussion of the CDC losing four top leaders overnight was concluded, as Compagno asked Kennedy an open-ended question that allowed him to segue to “our newest initiative to try to get the medical schools to start teaching nutrition.”
After a few minutes of discussion on that topic, the interview closed with an ominous sign for the future, as the HHS secretary previewed his promised September report on the purported causes of autism.
“We are now developing sufficient evidence to ask for regulatory action on some of those, or at least recommendations,” Kennedy said.
It seems likely that Kennedy will attempt to carry out the anti-vax project to which he’s already dedicated years of his life, using false claims that vaccines cause autism to try to alter the childhood vaccine schedule that reduces pediatric deaths and hospitalizations from infectious diseases.
After last week there are fewer senior leaders at CDC to stand up to Kennedy and his conspiracy theories. And going forward, we can expect Fox to be in his corner.
Reprinted with permission from Media Matters
