Dr. Demetre Daskalakis
“The CDC you knew is over,” the infectious diseases doctor told The Advocate. “Unless someone takes radical action, there is nothing there that can be salvaged.”
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.
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“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.”
