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Bulwark Takes

Mysterious “Secret Recording” Accusations Roil CDC Hearing

Bulwark Takes

The Bulwark

News, Society & Culture, Politics, News Commentary

4.71.2K Ratings

🗓️ 17 September 2025

⏱️ 23 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Sam Stein and Jonathan Cohn recap the Senate HELP hearing with former CDC chief Susan Monarez, covering why she was ousted, RFK Jr.’s push to delay childhood vaccines, the sidelining of CDC scientists during outbreaks, and the real stakes with public health and vaccine safety.

Read Jonathan’s The Breakdown, “RFK Jr.’s Crusade Against Vaccines Hits Its Action Phase”

Transcript

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0:00.0

Building a coffee business, serving the best Americano in town is up to you.

0:04.1

But winning back time and growing your business, leave that to sum up. Take orders and payments anywhere with the new SumUp terminal. Turn occasional customers into regulars with a free loyalty program. And with the SumUp point of sale system, you'll always know when you're running low on your best selling blends. Visit sumup.co.uk to learn more. Cohn, author of our breakdown newsletter, who is going to talk to us about a just-concluded

0:25.1

Senate help committee hearing involving Dr. Susan Menares, formerly the head of the CDC.

0:31.5

This comes a couple weeks after she was dismissed, fired by President Trump ultimately,

0:35.9

which came a little bit after three top

0:38.9

CDC officials resigned in protest over RFK Jr. and what he's doing to the agency.

0:44.7

There's a lot to unpack here, like a metric ton to impact here.

0:48.8

We'll start with the actual most important stuff and then get to the political stuff.

0:52.4

There were a few moments where Dr.

0:56.0

Monaras talked about things that are about to happen with respect to vaccines in this country.

1:02.4

We have a very important meeting coming up in the next day and then the day after that with

1:06.8

the CDC's advisory committee on vaccines. And they're going to be looking at things like

1:11.3

the hepatitis B vaccine recommendations, childhood vaccine schedule, and so on and so forth.

1:15.7

There was real news made in this hearing about what's to come. Jonathan, why don't you want to

1:20.6

unpack that? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there was a lot of discussion about the Hep B vaccine.

1:25.3

Hep B real quickly, hepatitis B, liver disease.

1:30.1

We have a vaccine that we currently recommend is given to newborns right after birth, like the first

1:35.0

day now. And the reason is children can get it very easily at birth in their early months.

1:43.1

And if they do, there's a 90% chance that they develop a chronic

1:47.0

version that can develop cirrhosis, liver cancer, really horrible stuff. Actually, what I wrote about

1:51.7

today at the breakdown in my newsletter is all about this. We knew there's been reporting that

1:58.5

Kennedy was interested and his people were interested in changing the recommendation and pushing back that first dose.

...

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