By A former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) official is sounding the alarm about Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his policies after resigning from his post last week.
Former Director of the CDC’s Center for Immunization & Respiratory Diseases, Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, resigned last Wednesday following the White House’s firing of the agency’s director, Susan Monarez. During a Sunday interview on ABC’s “This Week,” he slammed Kennedy and said he can “only see harm coming” as a result of his policies, noting that his leadership wants “to see the undoing of vaccination.”
“I mean, from my vantage point as a doctor who’s taken the Hippocratic oath, I only see harm coming,” Daskalakis said. “I may be wrong. But…based on what I’ve heard with the new members of the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices, or ACIP, they’re really moving in an ideologic direction where they want to see the undoing of vaccination. They do want to see the undoing of mRNA vaccination.”
Daskalakis also criticized Kennedy for changing the childhood schedule for COVID-19 vaccination, saying officials were “directed that only children with underlying conditions would be the ones that should qualify for vaccination.”
“That’s not what the data shows,” he argued. “Six months old to two-year-old, their underlying condition is youth. Fifty-three percent of those children hospitalized last season had no underlying conditions. The data say that in that age range, you should be vaccinating your child.”
Daskalakis also condemned the new leader of the CDC, Jim O’Neill, a senior HHS official with deep ties to Republican donor Peter Thiel.
“Honestly, I really want to trust him, because I do not,” he said of O’Neill.
Daskalakis criticized O’Neill’s post on social media platform X, where he accused the CDC of “manipulating health data to support a political narrative.”
“His destabilization of trust in experts […] that skepticism by the new acting director of CDC should tell you that we have a big problem,” he said.
“If he’s running a health organization, he needs the expertise of people who know health and know science,” he added. “It seems like he doesn’t trust his own people already. It’s not going to be a good path.”
When asked about his departure from the CDC, Daskalakis said he has been worried for months about the future of the agency and what he is leaving behind.
“Of course I’m worried. I’ve been worried for months,” he said.
“I have been ready to do this when I felt that I hit the line,” he added. “And I hit the line when both I didn’t think that we were going to be able to present science in a way free of ideology, that the firewall between science and ideology is completely broken down. And not having a scientific leader at CDC meant that we wouldn’t be able to have the necessary diplomacy and connection with HHS to be able to really execute on good public health.”
Daskalakis’s comments come after Trump fired Monarez and Kennedy instated several changes to the CDC, including plans to limit access to the COVID-19 vaccine. Several CDC officials announced their resignation, including Daskalakis, shortly after the changes.