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 of the agency.
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 CDC, Monarez carried out directives from the White House to scrub the agency’s website of anything related to “gender ideology.”
In February, a judge ordered the CDC to restore the webpages that it had deleted. Many pages on the agency’s website, including one on preventing HIV, 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 selection of Monarez comes three weeks after the White House abruptly withdrew Trump’s first pick, former Florida congressman Dr. Dave Weldon, just before he was scheduled for a confirmation hearing before the Senate Health, Labor, Education and Pensions committee.
Weldon had a history of questioning the safety of vaccines, including the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, falsely linking it to autism.
The new CDC director will take the helm as the U.S. in the midst of a growing measles outbreak in Texas and two other states that has killed an adult and a child.
Prior to joining the CDC, Monarez was deputy director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, or ARPA-H, a research funding agency focused on biomedical innovations.
This will be the first time a CDC director will be required to go through the Senate confirmation process, where she’s sure to face questions about her views on vaccines.
A date for that hearing had not been set as of Monday afternoon.
