Demetre Daskalakis, who resigned as the director of immunisation at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) after the White House fired CDC chief Susan Monarez, has warned of the future of American health under Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr. In an interview with ABC News on Sunday, Daskalakis said: “From my vantage point as a doctor who’s taken the Hippocratic Oath, I only see harm coming.”
Daskalakis expressed concern over the new direction of the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP), saying its new members are “really moving in an ideological direction where they want to see the undoing of vaccination.” Explaining his resignation, he said he no longer believed science could be presented “free of ideology” and that “the firewall between science and ideology has completely broken down.”
He also criticised Kennedy’s recent changes to the childhood Covid-19 vaccine schedule, noting that the vaccine is approved for people aged 65 and older, as well as for children and adults with underlying conditions. Daskalakis said the data did not support limiting access for young children, pointing out that 53% of hospitalised children aged six months to two years had no underlying conditions. He also cast doubt on new CDC chief Jim O’Neill, who has no medical or infectious disease training, saying O’Neill’s comments about scientists manipulating data suggested “I know what leader he serves, and that leader is one that does not believe in vaccination.”
Meanwhile, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders wrote in a New York Times op-ed that Kennedy is “endangering the health of the American people now and into the future” and said “he must resign.” More than 750 current and former employees of US health agencies signed a letter accusing Kennedy of being an “existential threat to public health” and “complicit in dismantling America’s public health infrastructure.”
The turmoil comes after a deadly shooting at CDC headquarters in Atlanta earlier this month, when a gunman fired more than 180 rounds into the buildings, killing a police officer before dying from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The gunman’s father said his son had been influenced by misinformation that led him to believe the Covid-19 vaccine was making him sick.
