DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION—Republican strategist Scott Jennings blasted the nation’s public health establishment Sunday during a CNN panel, saying that the government’s COVID-era approach “deserves to be turned inside out.”
Chaos ensued at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Wednesday after Director Susan Monarez rejected her ouster and four senior officials abruptly resigned. Jennings said on “State of the Union” that the issue was not about Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. but about the failures of the public health bureaucracy.
“The reason we’re here is not because of Kennedy. The reason we’re here is because the public health regime deserves to be turned inside out after COVID,” Jennings said on CNN’s “State of the Union Jake Tapper and Dana Bash.”
Jennings argued that the government should conduct rolling investigations into vaccines and public health guidance, warning that officials often tell Americans things that later prove false.
“I do think it’s not inappropriate for the government to have on a rolling basis, investigations of what we’re doing because sometimes we find out that what we’re doing or what we told the American people turned out not to be true,” Jennings added. “So rolling investigations of vaccines and the advice we give the American people on this, on food, which is another big part of his [Kennedy’s] agenda. He has a lot of popular support for that, truthfully.”
Jennings said growing skepticism toward the COVID vaccine reflects lingering distrust of health officials, noting that just 23% of adults and 13% of children received the shot last year.
“As it relates specifically to the COVID vaccine, which has been a flashpoint lately, I do think there are legitimate questions about whether it should have been mandated and they took away the emergency designation,” Jennings explained. “I think only 23% of American adults said they got it last year. Only 13% of children were given it. So the American people had started to make a decision about that.”
Hints of a shake-up surfaced when the CDC abruptly canceled an agencywide call Monday, the Washington Post reported. The news came less than a month after the Senate confirmed Monarez and days after a shooting at CDC headquarters killed DeKalb County Police Officer David Rose.
