A mass exit at CDC and a new confusing label for COVID-19 vaccines from the FDA.

This is American Dissected. I'm your host, Dr. Abdul-El-Sal-Aid.

So Caitlin and I initially recorded an episode on Tuesday, but given that there's been a lot of changes over the last week, I wanted to come back through when we record.

So this is an update as of Wednesday, August 27th at 8.30 p.m. Eastern time.

So the first most important piece of news here is a huge shake-up at the CDC.

Susan Menares, who had just been

approved and confirmed by the Senate just a couple of weeks ago, she's out. She resigned. And the

announcement is kind of confusing. It reads, quote, Susan Minares is no longer director of the Centers

for Disease Control and Prevention. We thank her for her dedicated service to the American people.

So, of course, this is really confusing because a Senate confirmation

is no easy task and you don't do all this work of getting somebody confirmed by the U.S. Senate

to oust them just a few weeks later. So what really happened here? Did Minars decide to leave,

given all this news from the FDA about the COVID vaccine that's coming soon? When she pushed out,

it's really unclear. But what we do know is that she was walking a really difficult tightrope. On the one hand, she's somebody who's been at the CDC in the past and seems to have a strong fealty, both to the institution itself and the science that motivates its work. And at the same time, she's operating under the leadership of RFK Jr. And if you listen to this podcast, I don't have to tell you too much more about that. But that put her between a rock and a hard place. So it's not that surprising that, unfortunately, this is the outcome. What do I think about it? Well, minaras might have been the studious hand we could have expected to operate under RFK Jr. And I worry about what this means for the next appointment. Remember, she was the second name floated. The first was a former congressman, David Weldon, whose nomination was pulled before Senate confirmation. And she's not the only one who's out at the CDC. He also had three other high-profile folks resigned. First, the chief medical officer. Second, the director of the National Center for Emerging in Zoonotic Infectious Diseases. And third, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Disease. I want to read for you an excerpt from one of those letters. They wrote, quote, I am not able to serve in this role any longer because of the ongoing weaponization of public health. Another wrote, and I quote, the ongoing changes prevent me from

continuing in my job as a leader of the agency and added that science should, quote, never be

censored or subject to political interpretations. You can imagine that this is extremely destabilizing,

given that just a couple weeks ago, you had an individual who shot hundreds of bullets into the

windows of the CDC and a brave law enforcement officer who tried to stop him lost his life in the process. The question now is what next? Who's going to lead the CDC? I worry that the next choice is going to be someone who's much more of a sycophant, somebody who's handpicked by RFK Jr. to just give a rubber stamp to the things that he wants to do through the CDC. And that's going to be

bad for all of us. The other important piece of news to discuss since Caitlin and I first taped

is the release of the FDA's licenses for COVID vaccines. They approved the next COVID vaccine for

the fall season. Sure. The previous vaccine was licensed for everybody aged six months or above,

meaning that anybody over six months was included under the FDA's

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