The recent ouster of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Susan Monarez and the resignations of top officials mark not just an institutional crisis but the latest chapter in a political war on evidence-based public health. This purge is not reform. It is the culmination of a right-wing assault that began in President Donald Trump’s first term, when science was mocked, expertise sidelined and conspiracy theories elevated above epidemiology.

From Trump’s withdrawal of the United States from the World Health Organization to his nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime vaccine skeptic and conspiracy theorist, as secretary of health and human services, to his current dismantling of the CDC, the pattern is clear: Public health is being redefined not as a shared good but

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