Demetre Daskalakis resigned as director of the CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, citing dismantling of scientific integrity and sidelining of career experts. Daskalakis accused the Trump administration and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. of reshaping vaccine policy to fit ideology rather than medical evidence and of suppressing data and narrowing vaccine eligibility. Daskalakis warned these moves threaten the lives of the youngest Americans and pregnant people and could return the country to a pre-vaccine era. Daskalakis also cited administration attacks on transgender Americans and efforts to terminate domestic and global HIV programs. Susan Monarez was forced out as CDC director weeks earlier.
Dr. Demetre Daskalakis's resignation on Wednesday as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases marked a dramatic rupture inside the nation's premier public health agency. In a blistering public letter, he accused the Trump administration and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. of dismantling scientific integrity, sidelining career experts, and reshaping vaccine policy to fit ideology rather than medical evidence.
"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 [RFK Jr.] 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."
He warned that the administration's directives, suppressing data and narrowing vaccine eligibility, "threaten the lives of the youngest Americans and pregnant people." Such moves, he wrote, could return the country to a "pre-vaccine era where only the strong will survive." He described Kennedy's rhetoric as "derivative of a legacy that good medicine and science should continue to shun," and added that his decision was also shaped by the administration's attacks on transgender Americans and efforts to terminate domestic and global HIV programs.
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