CNN’s Scott Jennings Calls For ‘Rolling Investigations’ Of Public Health System
Amid turmoil at the CDC, Jennings argues the public health bureaucracy deserves to be turned inside out following COVID-era failures.
Republican strategist Scott Jennings is calling for significant reform of the nation’s public health establishment, stating that the government’s approach during the COVID-19 pandemic “deserves to be turned inside out.”
Speaking on CNN’s “State of the Union”, Jennings argued that recent chaos at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is a direct result of public distrust stemming from the pandemic response.
The comments come as the CDC faces internal upheaval, with Director Susan Monarez reportedly rejecting her ouster and four senior officials abruptly resigning. Jennings stated that the central issue isn’t the new Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but rather the failures of the public health bureaucracy itself.
“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,” he said.
Calls for Ongoing Scrutiny
During the panel, Jennings advocated for “rolling investigations” into public health guidance and vaccines. He suggested that such oversight is necessary because information provided to the public by officials has, at times, later been found to be inaccurate.
“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 stated.
He connected this call for scrutiny to a broader public skepticism toward the COVID-19 vaccine, citing data that only 23% of American adults and 13% of children received the shot last year. Jennings presented this as evidence that the public is making its own decisions about health advice.
The internal unrest at the CDC became public after the agency canceled a scheduled call for Monday.
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