Kennedy-Appointed CDC Vaccine Advisor Posts Bizarre Conspiracy Theory Ahead of ACIP Meeting

Dr. Robert Malone suggested former CDC Director Susan Monarez was trained to “lie” by the intelligence community.

On Wednesday, ahead of this week’s two-day meeting of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, a member of the body tweeted a baseless conspiracy theory about former CDC Director Susan Monarez, PhD, who was testifying before the Senate about her ouster last month.

Monarez told members of the Senate’s Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions that she had been fired by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. after resisting pressure from the longtime anti-vaccine activist to give “blanket approval” for his agenda. Specifically, Monarez said Kennedy wanted her to rubber stamp changes to the childhood vaccine schedule based on the recommendations of ACIP, which he reshaped in June, firing all 17 members and replacing them with his anti-vax and contrarian allies.

Kennedy, who has a long history of making false statements, has disputed Monarez’s account and has repeatedly claimed he fired her because she told him she was not "trustworthy”—a description that stands in stark contrast with how the secretary described her when she was confirmed to her post in July.

At the time, Kennedy had called Monarez “a public health expert with unimpeachable scientific credentials” and said he had “full confidence in her ability to restore the CDC's role as the most trusted authority in public health and to strengthen our nation's readiness to confront infectious diseases and biosecurity threats."

ACIP member Dr. Robert Malone, a physician and prolific anti-vaccine and pandemic conspiracy theorist, publicly took Kennedy’s side floating a bizarre conspiracy theory about the former CDC director. Malone suggested that not only was Monarez lying in her testimony, but perhaps she had been “trained” to do so by the “intelligence community.”

”The CIA trains people how to lie and manipulate others. That is a fact,” Malone wrote in a post on X. “Has she been trained to lie by our intelligence community?”

A physician and biochemist, Malone is perhaps best known for overstating his role in the development of mRNA vaccine technology while spreading fear and misinformation about the COVID shots, which he once suggested had caused 17 million deaths worldwide. But he also has a history of promoting unsubstantiated claims of government conspiracies.

In his bestselling 2022 book, “Lies My Gov’t Told Me: And the Better Future Coming,” which featured a foreword by Kennedy and was published by his anti-vax group, Children’s Health Defense, Malone claimed that former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases head Dr. Anthony Fauci was manipulating the public’s fear in order to amass power. The follow up to that book—the Kennedy-endorsed “PsyWar: Enforcing the New World Order,” which he co-authored with his wife—purported to expose how the U.S. government had used psychological warfare tactics against the American people, including during the COVID-19 pandemic, to engineer social control. It alleged that the Department of Defense, the FBI, and the CIA work with a “censorship industrial complex” to give the government “reality-bending information control capabilities.”

Malone became famous for a December 2021 appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast in which he claimed that the population was under the influence of “mass formation psychosis”—a form of hypnosis tricking the public into supporting COVID mitigation measures and trusting experts. He famously espoused this theory during a December 2021 appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast and compared pandemic control measures to life in Nazi Germany.

Malone’s latest conspiracy theory about Monarez was not the only bizarre post from the anti-vax physician on Wednesday. The fringe ACIP member posted a chart of unproven COVID treatments and their alleged “cost per life saved.” The chart included ivermectin, which research has repeatedly demonstrated is not effective against the coronavirus. Malone was previously a senior advisor to the Independent Medical Alliance, an ivermectin-pushing, anti-vax dark money group formerly known as the Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance.

At its meetings this week, ACIP is set to discuss the measles-mumps-rubella, hepatitis B, and COVID vaccines—all of which have been targets of Kennedy and his allies. The meetings mark the first for five new ACIP members, who were announced by the secretary on Monday. They include IMA senior fellow Dr. Kirk Milhoan.