Former Chief Medical Officer for the CDC on RFK Jr. era

WASHINGTON (CBS, KYMA) - Dr. Debra Houry, the former Chief Medical Officer for the CDC, spoke with Margaret Brennan on Face the Nation about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s role as the Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary.

According to Brennan, when President Donald Trump was elected, he made an alliance with the Make America Healthy Again movement, and Kennedy, who President Trump appointed to be the HHS Secretary, said, "The CDC is the most corrupt federal agency in all of HHS."

This prompted Brennan to ask Dr. Houry, who spent 11 years with the CDC until August of last year, what she thought of Kennedy being in charge was going to mean to her, and Houry said:

"Certainly, I was a little concerned, but under the first Trump Administration things went really well overall, you know. We saw things like suicide prevention get started under the first administration, so I was cautiously optimistic. And then, I was also the transition lead for the agency, so I knew that our goal was to really position ourselves to work with the new administration, and that hopefully, if we could actually meet with the secretary, present data, and align with some of his priorities, we wanted, say, food and water as well, that maybe we could find some common ground, but I was worried."

Brennan also said the Senate committee overseeing health agencies asked Houry to share some of the documents and emails she had collected before her departure, leading her to ask why she was saving the emails, and Houry said:

"I think just in general good clinical practice, you know, I always documented on patients, and so similarly, as I was, you know, overseeing many decisions or part of discussions, I thought it was important to really document how those decisions were being made, particularly when I had concerns that there were conflicts of interest that weren't being taken care of, when there were issues around scientific integrity and political interference...and despite all that, you know, I was a capstone official, which meant any of my emails always are retained through Freedom of Information Act, so I just thought it was prudent to really document what was going on."

Houry said she felt like she was creating a paper trail adding, "I wanted to show how we were making decisions, and if there were concerns, why that was there. I knew that history, at some point, would look back on this, and so I wanted to make sure that we had that historical record."

After 250 of the emails and documents being made public by the Senate committee, Brennan then asked Houry what was happening inside the CDC that made her say it was "going to be historic," and Houry said:

"It happened almost from the very beginning under the new administration. Within the first week or two, we started getting executive orders where we took down hundreds of websites, and I thought this is highly unusual, you know. Science doesn't change based on who is in office, and so when these things were happening, I knew this was different than before. I also didn't brief the secretary, which was very different than prior administrations. And when we had many requests coming from political appointees on things that had happened 30 years ago that didn't really need to be relitigated at a taxpayer expense, I became very concerned that data, science and facts would not be enough."

During the interview, Brennan and Houry talked about Kennedy asking HHS to pull down all the "Wild to Mild" ads, which was created to combat an intense flu season that killed 300 kids, leading Brennan to ask why, and Houry said:

"It was one of those things, I got calls from our communication staff saying this has happened, and I first thought there's a misunderstanding, where children are dying, it's an active flu season, it's not like flu is over, and we'd already paid for these ads, so it didn't make any sense. And so, I brought it to our political leaders and brought it back to our communications staff, and asked them to please relay back to the department, surely this isn't what you want. And then we got a note back, it's a direct request from the secretary."

Later in the interview, Brennan and Houry talked about Kennedy's focus on finding the cause of autism, with Brennan asking if Houry trusts what is being conducted in terms of research into autism, and she said:

"Absolutely not, and that's unfortunate, because autism is a significant issue in our country and worldwide, but there's not a single answer to it. You know, we know that 40% to 60% is linked to some sort of genetic etiology. There's environmental factors, there's probably infectious disease factors. So you need to really have a robust field of study around autism versus again looking at a single question. And what we saw was back in February and March, we were asked to look at autism, and we proposed several different ideas, including a large study looking at autism and working with NIH. And what came back to us was no, we want to look at the Vaccine Safety Datalink data for autism. So narrowing in on vaccines and autism versus what we had proposed. And even more concerning is when my staff reached out to NIH scientists who did autism work, they weren't aware that the NIH acting director and some of the other NIH politicals had reached out to us about looking at vaccine and autism and CDC data."

Brennan brought up a press conference Kennedy held back in April on what he called the autism epidemic, and where he claimed the media has an ideology of epidemic denial as they were not asking enough questions about why there's an uptick.

Brennan also said Houry wrote, in one of her documents, saying there was a bit of concern about hearing what the secretary said, leading her to ask what concerns Houry was hearing, and Houry said:

"Even you know President Trump's first surgeon general, Jerome Adams, put out on social media about how the secretary really focused on profound autism and not really looking at the whole spectrum of autism and just really demeaning. You know, in my mind, anybody with autism versus recognizing the struggle that individuals and families have, and how we could support them. And he- you know, really kind of misrepresented the data, like conflating information on states, when a lot of it had to do with detection. And if we had been able to brief him, like I had suggested, since it was a CDC paper, we could have walked through that with him, like what the statistical analyzes meant, what some of these findings meant, but we weren't given that opportunity. And there was backlash from many in the autism community, including groups like Autism Speaks, because of how the secretary spoke about autism. And again, autism is impacting so many families in our nation. We need to look at it seriously, and not with a conspiracy lens, like the secretary is doing."

To watch Brennan's full interview with Houry, click here.