The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, once regarded as the nation’s premier agency against illness, is now damaged beyond repair, according to one of its most prominent departing leaders. “We may be past the point of no return,” Dr. Demetre Daskalakis warned in an interview Friday, a day after leaving the agency’s Atlanta campus with colleagues in a dramatic walkout.
The gay infectious diseases physician and expert told The Advocate that President Donald Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had 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.
Related: Out CDC vaccine chief resigns, saying ‘enough is enough’ with Trump and RFK Jr.
On Wednesday, Daskalakis published a scathing resignation letter, shortly after news broke that CDC director Susan Monarez had been ousted by the Trump administration only weeks after being sworn in.
By Thursday afternoon, he was “very respectfully” escorted out of the building. Outside the CDC headquarters, hundreds of employees and supporters greeted him and two other resigning department directors, Chief Medical Officer Debra Houry, and Director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases Daniel Jernigan, with flowers, applause, and tears.
“I expected to have a small group. Instead, a roaring crowd lined Clifton Road,” he told The Advocate. “That’s my experience of public health. It’s people who really, really care. And so having them dehumanized by certain factions, including, I think, the secretary, made it all the more important to remind them of their humanity.”
Dan Jernigan, Deb Houry, and Daskalakis greet supporters outside the CDC’s global headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, after their resignations.Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images
A five-alarm fire
Daskalakis, who directed the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, resigned over what he described as Kennedy’s and Trump’s dismantling of vaccine policy, erasure of LGBTQ+ data, and “undoing of public health.”
“The CDC you knew is over,” he said. “Unless someone takes radical action, there is nothing there that can be salvaged.”
The damage, he argued, is structural. Senior staff who spread disinformation about COVID-19 vaccines now hold oversight authority. More than 600 employees have already been purged or reassigned. Programs for HIV prevention, overdose response, and smoking cessation are vanishing. “Someone will be diagnosed with lung cancer at 40 because they couldn’t find a program that once existed,” he warned.
It also goes further. Recently, the CDC scaled back its Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network, discontinuing routine tracking for pathogens such as Campylobacter, Listeria, and Shigella, which have long been associated with severe outbreaks. Public health experts warn that the rollback leaves the nation less able to identify food safety threats promptly.
Related: Health officials and experts praise CDC’s Demetre Daskalakis for standing up in blistering resignation
HIV programs are also under attack. HHS has rolled back prevention efforts and slashed research funding, with cuts to the Ryan White program and the Minority AIDS Initiative. Advocates warn the cuts will devastate communities already hit hardest by the epidemic.
For Daskalakis, the rot is visible in even the most technical details of CDC governance. He pointed to the agency’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, commonly referred to as ACIP, where critical decisions regarding vaccine guidance are made. Each work group within ACIP operates under a “terms of reference” document that outlines its organizing strategy.
When the new COVID-19 work group’s terms were published this summer, he said, they bore no trace of input from the program staff or from career experts in policy and law who had raised alarms. Instead, the document formalized a chain of command that placed his own boss—and by extension his staff—under a senior leader whose public statements directly contradicted the science.
“That individual’s pinned tweet says no one should ever get a COVID vaccine because it’s a bad vaccine,” Daskalakis explained.
The official in question, ACIP member Retsef Levi, whom Kennedy appointed to lead the review. Levi is not a medical doctor. He’s a professor of operations management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has used his platform to argue that mRNA vaccines are inherently dangerous. His pinned post from 2023 still reads: “The evidence is mounting and indisputable that MRNA vaccines cause serious harm including death, especially among young people. We have to stop giving them immediately!”
Daskalakis said, “That’s a lie. And yet, according to this official piece of paper, that’s who I report to.”
The cost of misinformation
The cumulative harm is not theoretical. Daskalakis pointed to an August 8 shooting incident at the CDC when a gunman radicalized by vaccine disinformation shot at the institution and killed a police officer.
Patrick Joseph White, 30, fired over 180 rounds, shattering windows and striking four buildings. He then barricaded himself in a CVS before dying from a self-inflicted gunshot. DeKalb County Officer David Rose, a Marine vet, young father to two with a third on the way, died from his injuries.
“That’s the human cost of politicizing science,” Daskalakis said.
Supporters hold signs and cheer for Jernigan, Houry, and Daskalakis outside of the CDC headquarters on August 28, 2025.Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images
Invisible firewall eroded
For most Americans, the CDC has always operated in the background as a silent shield. That, Daskalakis argued, is the ideal: a system so effective you barely notice it. “The American people expect that public health functions at a level that is so great that they don’t perceive that it exists,” he explained.
Related: White House Monkeypox Response Team Gives Update to LGBTQ+ Community
“You don’t want to know about the legionella in the cooling tower in New York City. You don’t want to know about the rabid bat that potentially exposed people. You don’t want to hear about Ebola in another part of the world that could reach your health system. The goal of public health is to stop those things before you ever notice them.”
That expectation, he said, is now breaking down. The invisible firewall has holes.
“When people start to notice that they can’t get smoking cessation programs, or that outbreaks aren’t contained, that’s when the failure of public health becomes visible and deadly,” Daskalakis said.
This week, Kennedy and other vaccine skeptics within the federal bureaucracy cast doubt on mRNA shots, narrowed CDC recommendations for who can receive the vaccine, and blocked broad approval of updated vaccines from Moderna and Novavax, even as schools reopen and the respiratory virus season looms.
“This is about creating the point of least resistance, and the bugs know how to find it,” said Daskalakis, invoking the Latin principle of locus minoris resistentiae — infections flow to the weakest spots — and calling out the Trump administration’s attempts to delete mentions of transgender and nonbinary people from government databases, communications, and more. “When you dismantle infrastructure and erase populations from data, you’re not just harming trans people or rural America. You’re making the entire country sicker.”
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Erasure as policy
For LGBTQ+ communities, the changes have been immediate and brutal. In January, Trump issued an executive order forcing government agencies to adopt a binary understanding of gender based on sex assigned at birth. Data collection on gender identity has been halted, making it impossible to track community spread.
Related: Mpox: 1-on-1 With the White House’s Response Deputy Coordinator
He pointed to the starkest case: HIV surveillance. Without gender identity in the data, a sudden outbreak among trans women could spread undetected, stripped of the statistical markers that would normally sound an alarm. “Imagine you’re in New York City, and transmission is rising in a specific community,” he said. “If you’ve erased that community from the data, you’ll never know it’s happening until it’s already a crisis.”
He recalled how that principle guided the federal response to mpox in 2022. At the time, as case numbers rose rapidly among men who have sex with men, public health leaders worked directly with advocates and community organizations to reach people where they were. Former HHS officials credited Daskalakis for developing an intradermal administration protocol that quadrupled the number of vaccine doses available. The LGBTQ+ community lined up for shots.
“That wasn’t about politics, it was about trust,” Daskalakis said. “We partnered with bars, clubs, and Pride events, because those were the spaces where people needed information, testing, and vaccines. That’s why the outbreak came under control.”
The lesson, he argued, is simple but devastating. Community engagement isn’t ancillary to science; it is science.
Now, with Kennedy and Trump reshaping CDC policy, he explained that kind of community-driven science is being dismantled.
“If you erase the people most affected from the data, you erase the solution too,” he said.
Daskalakis supporters get emotional at the “clapout” honoring him after his resignation from the CDC.Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images
Dangerous quackery
Daskalakis also revealed that, under Kennedy’s leadership, the secretary never met with subject-matter experts from his division, not even for briefings on measles, COVID, or RSV, in the seven months he has served. “He has never been briefed by any human from my center about anything,” Daskalakis said.
Kennedy has appeared on Fox News and social media and promoted conspiracy theories. One of the most recent alarming examples came when Kennedy, at a press conference in Texas on Thursday, claimed he could diagnose mitochondrial disorders and systemic inflammation in children simply by looking at them, a claim made despite his lack of a medical degree.
The health secretary talked about kids he observed since arriving in Texas, saying at the event, “I know what a healthy child is supposed to look like. I’m looking at kids as I walk through the airports today, as I walk down the street, and I see these kids that are just overburdened with mitochondrial challenges, with inflammation.”
He continued, “You can tell from their faces, from their body movements, and from their lack of social connection, and I know that that’s not how our children are supposed to look.”
Doctors have mocked Kennedy for his bizarre assertion.
Daskalakis said he was “unfamiliar with any metabolic disease that an untrained person would be able to identify by their eyes by just physical review in an airport.” He added that some metabolic diseases might have visible features but stressed that “there is no way to identify deep internal inflammation or inflammatory disease in most people, unless you are objectively looking at their arthritis or a skin condition.”
For him, the comment was just another moment proving Kennedy’s lack of expertise. “If the secretary listened to experts, it could be possible that you would take his medical advice,” he said. “But as it stands now, I do agree with his own assessment that you probably shouldn’t take his advice or really think of him as any kind of clinical authority.”
With a flash of dark sarcasm, Daskalakis added, “I wonder if you can see if someone has HIV, maybe he has that magic too.”
Daskalakis smiles broadly while a crowd of supporters cheer and clap for him outside CDC headquarters. Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images
COVID spike amid public health breakdown
At the very moment CDC scientists were packing up their offices, the agency quietly issued an alarming notice: COVID cases and emergency-room visits were climbing nationwide as Labor Day neared. Axios reports that the agency is bracing for a significant surge.
The juxtaposition could not have been sharper. A country heading into respiratory virus season, with schools reopening and daycares filling up, now faces both a new COVID wave and an agency in free fall.
Even Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican who helped shepherd Kennedy’s nomination through the U.S. Senate, said he would “discard” CDC vaccine guidance because of the turmoil. That kind of statement from a senior lawmaker stresses just how profoundly the agency’s credibility has been damaged, Daskalakis said.
For Daskalakis, the uncertainty is the real danger. If COVID-19 vaccines are not formally recommended at the next advisory meeting, insurers may not cover them. The federal Vaccines for Children program could stall distribution entirely. Meanwhile, life-saving RSV treatments for infants, hailed as a breakthrough last year, are now at risk of being stripped from the agenda.
“Children will go to the ICU instead of being home for the holidays,” he said.
Daskalakis also warned that when ideology erases science, the results ripple far beyond infectious disease. “The firewall between politics and science is crumbling fast, and the call is coming from inside the house,” he said. For Americans concerned about their health and vaccines, he advised people to consult their doctors or pharmacists.
Health and Human Services Press Secretary Emily Hilliard did not respond to The Advocate’s request for comment.
Daskalakis and others wave at supporters.Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images
The Trump administration’s reaction to Daskalakis’s resignation
Since publicly raising the alarm, Daskalakis’s resignation letter itself became a flashpoint. In it, he wrote that changes to the immunization schedule threatened “the lives of the youngest Americans and pregnant people.” He also closed by listing his pronouns. To many in the scientific community, that inclusive language reflected evidence-based practice: acknowledging that not all people who can become pregnant identify as women.
But Trump press secretary Karoline Leavitt seized on it at the White House podium. Asked about the wave of resignations on Thursday, she dismissed Daskalakis outright. “One of those individuals wrote in his departure statement that he identifies pregnant women as pregnant people, so that’s not someone we want in this administration anyway.”
MAGA influencers piled on, using the phrase as proof of what they call “woke science.” For Daskalakis, the reaction was predictable and irrelevant. “I was bullied as a kid, and I learned the right way to deal with a bully is to clap back,” he said. “Did I include my pronouns on purpose? Absolutely.”
He pointed out the hypocrisy of an administration that insists it champions “free speech” while policing the language of medical experts. “If I want to say my pronouns are he, him, guess what? They’re my pronouns,” he said. “That’s called free speech.”
A crowd of supporters hold “saint” images of Jernigan, Houry, and Daskalakis in honor of their brave resignations from the CDC.Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images
Walking away from CDC, he carried the roar of his colleagues with him — a reminder, he said, that the heart of public health remains intact, even if the agency’s mission has been hollowed out.
“I’m more excited than ever to be a public health professional, and more determined than ever to be a voice for those inside who can’t speak,” he said.
For now, Daskalakis is taking stock of what’s next. He has “things percolating,” though nothing planned so soon. What he is sure of, he said, is his commitment to speak plainly about the crisis.
“I gave up my job as a red flag,” he said. “This is a five-alarm fire. If people don’t act now, ideology will fully consume science.”
Source: Advocate.com – www.advocate.com
