President Donald Trump has selected Susan Monarez as his new nominee to head the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Monarez, a scientist whose previous work looked at using artificial intelligence to improve health, has already been serving as acting director.
Trump made the announcement Monday on Truth Social. “Dr. Monarez brings decades of experience championing Innovation, Transparency, and strong Public Health Systems,” he wrote.
Trump also wrote that Monarez would work closely with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
As acting director at the CDC, Monarez carried out directives from the White House to scrub the agency’s website of anything related to “gender ideology.”
Last month, a judge ordered the CDC to restore the webpages it had deleted. Many pages on its website, including one about preventing HIV infection, are now topped with a statement that reads, in part, “Any information on this page promoting gender ideology is extremely inaccurate and disconnected from the immutable biological reality that there are two sexes, male and female.”
The White House abruptly withdrew Trump’s first pick, Dr. Dave Weldon, a Republican former congressman from Florida, just before he was scheduled for a confirmation hearing before the Senate Health, Labor, Education and Pensions Committee three weeks ago.
Weldon had a history of questioning the safety of vaccines, including the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, falsely linking it to autism.
Monarez will take the helm as the United States in the midst of a growing measles outbreak in Texas and two other states that has killed an adult and a child.
Before she joined the CDC, Monarez was deputy director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, a research funding agency focused on biomedical innovations.
It will be the first time a CDC director will be required to go through the Senate confirmation process, in which she’s sure to face questions about her views on vaccines.
A date for the hearing had not been set Monday afternoon.
