Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, one of the most visible masses in the country health Leader and long-standing voices LGBTQ+ Community has resigned from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He condemned what he describes as a wholesale dismantling of science under the president. Donald Trump’s Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.
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Daskalakis posted a ferocious resignation letter on X and Instagram on Wednesday evening. In it, he said he would resign as director of the CDC’s National Center for Vaccination and Respiratory Diseases on Thursday.
“We cannot provide services in an environment that does not reflect scientific reality and treats the CDC as a tool to generate policies and materials designed to hurt rather than improve the health of our citizens,” writes Daskalakis. “I think he and his staff are challenging my current role in the agency and my ability to serve the health of the American people. Enough is enough.”
Related: How CDC’s Dr. Demetre Daskalakis was on the forefront in 2021
Daskalakis sidelined career scientists, withheld data and denounced Kennedy’s HHS for deciding on vaccination schedules, saying it would “threate the lives of the youngest Americans and pregnant people.”
On Wednesday, the Food and Drug Administration approved the latest Covid-19 vaccines from Pfizer, Moderna and Novavax, but with a prominent break with years of policy, it reduced eligibility almost exclusively to older people and people with severe health conditions such as asthma and obesity. Healthy children under the age of 5 have been excluded from Pfizer approval since the vaccine became available. Modanya’s shots were restricted to only the youngest children with existing conditions.
Public health leaders immediately sounded the alarm. The American Academy of Pediatrics calls the new restrictions “deeply troublesome,” warning that sudden policy shifts will disrupt families, undermine trust in vaccines, leaving children unprotected just as seasonal respiratory illnesses begin to surge.
The resignation is the most dramatic rupture between career scientists and the Trump administration, disrupting decades of vaccine policy and announces drastic changes, often through social media posts and opinions. Daskarakis warned that “radical non-transparency” and “unskilled manipulation of data to achieve political termination” would risk returning to a “pre-vaccine era where only strong people survive.”
Daskarakis, a gay infectious disease doctor known for his dull candidness and visible tattoos, became prominent as New York City’s Associate Health Commissioner during the Covid-19 pandemic when he led offensive outreach in the queer community. He later became director of the CDC’s HIV and AIDS Prevention Department and was tapped by the Biden administration in 2022 as the deputy coordinator for national MPOX responses.
Related: Why are conservatives tearing their hair to this gay doctor?
For years, Daskarakis has been at the forefront of disproportionately impacting trends for a long time LGBTQ+People. During the MPOX outbreak in the summer of 2021 in Provincetown, Massachusetts, he helped lead the CDC’s pandemic messaging. A year later, he became the go-to official of the MPOX White House, where he advocated culturally competent outreach and access to equitable vaccines. The job made him a target for right-wing media who stuck to his sexuality, tattoos and social media presence. Daskalakis shrugged the attack and pushed on what could possibly start to fight for a public health crisis.
“Deliberate erosion of trust in low-risk vaccines, supporting natural and unproven relief measures, takes us to a pre-vaccine era,” he wrote in his letter of resignation. “Eugenics is a derivative of a heritage that is prominently played out by rhetoric being produced, and that good medicine and science should continue to eschew.”
Daskalakis’ decision came as part of a cascade of exits that has rocked the country’s finest public health agencies. Susan Monares, the director of the CDC, agreed by the Senate, was suddenly banished less than a month in the role, and her lawyer said she refused to reject Kennedy’s “unscientific and reckless instructions.” Within hours, Chief Medical Officer Dr. Debra Ahai and Daniel Jarnigan, director of the National Center for Emerging Zoonotic Diseases, also announced their resignation.
Washington Post Report Monales faced days of pressure from Kennedy and senior aides to support a drastic change in coronavirus vaccine policy and to deny her senior staff. When she refused, Kennedy demanded that she resign. She resisted and took over as support of Senate Health Committee Chairman Bill Cassidy. Bill Cassidy is a Republican who partially supported Kennedy’s nomination for assurances regarding vaccine protection. HHS later announced on social media that Monales “is no longer a director,” but her lawyers insisted that she would not be fired or resigned.
In one of the burning passages of his letter, Daskarakis highlighted his work with the queer community.
“For decades, I have been a reliable voice for the LGBTQ community on important health topics,” he writes. “I must also cite the recklessness of the administration in their efforts to erase the transgender population, halt important national and international HIV programming and terminate important research to support fairness as part of my decision.”
Related: Monkeypox: 1:1 with White House Response Associate Coordinator
He added, “Public health is not merely about personal health, it is about community, national and global health. Health safety in the nation is at risk and is in the hands of people who focus on ideological self-interest.”
At the CDC, subject experts were not allowed to do one substantial briefing with secretaries in the first seven months of the Trump administration, Daskalakis wrote. Instead, he was called “unscripted video or page long-X posts,” where major policy changes were unfolding, with scientists scrambling for data modifications in line with political direction.
He also linked his decision to the administration’s broader culture war agenda, saying that Trump and his allies “created an environment in which such violence could occur.” Recent filming at CDC Headquarters.
Daskarakis believed in resignation from his grandfather, resisting Greek fascism. “I’m resigning to be proud of him and his legacy,” he wrote.
The CDC and HHS did not respond immediately to requests for comment. Supporters I also contacted Daskarakis.
Source: Advocate.com – www.advocate.com
