A former Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention (CDC) official is sounding the alarm about Well being and Human Companies (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his insurance policies after resigning from his submit final week.
Former Director of the CDC’s Heart for Immunization & Respiratory Ailments, Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, resigned final Wednesday following the White Home’s firing of the company’s director, Susan Monarez. Throughout a Sunday interview on ABC’s “This Week,” he slammed Kennedy and stated he can “only see harm coming” on account of his insurance policies, noting that his management needs “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 stated. “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 additionally criticized Kennedy for altering the childhood schedule for COVID-19 vaccination, saying officers have been “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 additionally condemned the brand new chief 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 stated of O’Neill.
Daskalakis criticized O’Neill’s submit on social media platform X, the place 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 stated.
“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 requested about his departure from the CDC, Daskalakis stated he has been nervous for months about the way forward for the company and what he’s abandoning.
“Of course I’m worried. I’ve been worried for months,” he stated.
“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 feedback come after Trump fired Monarez and Kennedy instated a number of modifications to the CDC, together with plans to restrict entry to the COVID-19 vaccine. A number of CDC officers introduced their resignation, together with Daskalakis, shortly after the modifications.
The Hill has contacted the CDC and HHS for remark.
