Once seen as the nation’s trusted agency against illness, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is now damaged beyond repair, according to one of the CDC’s most distinguished former leaders. Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, who directed the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, departed the CDC over what he described as “Kennedy’s and Trump’s demolishing of vaccine policy, erasure of the LGBTQ+ community” and the “undoing of public health.”
On August 27, Daskalakis published a scathing resignation letter. “We may be past the point of no return,” he later warned on August 29, a day after participating in a walkout with colleagues.
“The intentional eroding of trust in low-risk vaccines, favoring natural infection and unproven remedies, will bring us to a pre-vaccine era,” he wrote in his resignation letter. “Eugenics plays prominently in the rhetoric being generated and is derivative of a legacy that good medicine and science should continue to shun.”
The physician told The Advocate that President Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “have so thoroughly politicized science that the once-respected CDC is no longer the institution that Americans and the world can regard as the gold standard in public health.”
“I am unable to serve in an environment that treats CDC as a tool to generate policies and materials that do not reflect scientific reality and are designed to hurt rather than to improve the public’s health,” Daskalakis wrote. “I find that the views he and his staff have shared challenge my ability to continue in my current role at the agency and in the service of the health of the American people. Enough is enough.”
The damage is structural, Daskalakis reveals. Senior staff who spread disinformation about COVID-19 vaccines during the pandemic now hold authority positions. Over 600 employees have already been fired or reassigned. Programs for HIV prevention have been rolled back, and research funding has been significantly cut. Programs for overdose response and smoking cessation are vanishing.
“The CDC you knew is over,” he says. “Unless someone takes radical action, there is nothing there that can be salvaged.”
