To put it bluntly, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is in a complete freefall.
Under the reign of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the longtime crank turned U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary, thousands of people have lost their jobs, the organization’s policies have been hijacked by allies of the anti-vaccination movement, and workers there have endured a deadly shooting committed by a man whose motives were likely influenced by misinformation about the covid-19 vaccines.
The most dramatic upheaval occurred in late August, when former CDC director Susan Monarez was fired just four weeks into taking the role. Monarez has since publicly testified that she was let go for refusing to sign off, without review, on the vaccine-related recommendations of RFK’s handpicked advisors, many of whom—like Kennedy himself—have a history of spreading misinformation about vaccines.
Immediately after Monarez’s reported firing, in a coordinated act of protest, three senior staff members at the CDC turned in their resignation notice: Debra Houry, CDC’s former chief medical officer, Daniel Jernigan, former director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, and Demetre Daskalakis, former director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases (a fourth senior official, Jennifer Layden, former director of the CDC’s Office of Public Health Data, Surveillance, and Technology, also resigned).
“We should practice detachment from the organizations and focus on the mission. And the mission is the health of the public.”
Gizmodo reached out to Daskalakis to discuss the events within the CDC leading up to the resignation, the fallout since, and what the path forward might look like in a world where trust in the CDC has eroded. The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and grammar.
Ed Cara, Gizmodo: Can you take us through the first days and weeks of the second Trump administration for you and others at the CDC? What was the general mood?
Demetre Daskalakis: Soon after the election, when President Donald Trump announced that RFK Jr. was going to be his candidate for the Secretary of Health and Human Services—that was obviously the beginning red flag.
Prior to the CDC, I had worked in New York City for many years in the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. While there, I had been involved as the incident commander over the measles outbreak from 2018 to 2019. And that’s the first time that I had any awareness of the sort of anti-vaccine strategies of RFK Jr. and the organizations he participated in.
So while we were running the measles response, one of his organizations, Children’s Health Defense, was working to undermine the work we were doing. It supported anti-vaccine messaging, and RFK Jr. would go on to sue the health department while we were in the middle of our response, trying to destabilize what we were doing. At that point, I was like, “There’s this kooky guy who’s a Kennedy who is really trying to interfere with this important work to prevent kids from getting sick.” So when they said his name as the candidate, I was like, “Oh boy.”
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