One top official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently submitted his resignation letter to President Donald Trump's administration, and lobbed several parting shots at both Trump and the MAGA movement.
In a lengthy 1,200-word post to his official X account on Wednesday, Dr. Demetre C. Daskalakis — who was the CDC's Director of National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases — publicly laid out his reasons for resigning from the CDC, where he's been since 2020. Daskalakis strongly rebuked Department of Health and Human Services Secretary (HHS) Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s crusade against vaccines, and told his followers that despite multiple ongoing threats to public health like the spread of measles and the avian flu, he had never personally been briefed on HHS' policies on the response to those outbreaks since RFK Jr. was confirmed.
"The intentional eroding of trust in low-risk vaccines favoring natural infection and unproven remedies will bring us to a pre-vaccine era where only the strong will survive and many if not all will suffer," Daskalakis wrote. "I believe in nutrition and exercise. I believe in making our food supply healthier, and I also believe in using vaccines to prevent death and disability. Eugenics plays prominently in the rhetoric being generated and is derivative of a legacy that good medicine and science should continue to shun."
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The outgoing CDC official also noted that his resignation was not in response to the shooting at the CDC's Atlanta office earlier this month, in which a lone gunman fired hundreds of shots at the agency's building. Daskalakis said his decision to leave the agency was out of a sense of duty he felt to his grandfather (and his namesake), who he said died fighting fascism.
"My grandfather, who I am named after, stood up to fascist forces in Greece and lost his life doing so. I am resigning to make him and his legacy proud," he wrote. "I am resigning because of the cowardice of a leader that cannot admit that HIS and his minions’ words over decades created an environment where violence like this can occur. I reject his and his colleagues’ thoughts and prayers, and advise they direct those to people that they have not actively harmed."
As a longtime gay activist, Daskalakis criticized the Trump administration's "recklessness" in its efforts to "erase transgender populations, cease critical domestic and international HIV programming and terminate key research to support equity." He also emphasized: "The nation’s health security is at risk and is in the hands of people focusing on ideological self-interest."
Daskalakis' resignation was part of a series of high-profile resignations at the CDC on Wednesday evening. The Washington Post initially reported that CDC director Susan Monarez — who was confirmed by the U.S. Senate less than a month ago — had been fired, though in a statement issued by her attorneys, Monarez maintained that she had not been given any notice of her dismissal by the White House and that she did not plan to resign from her role. Monarez's statement also accused the Trump administration of compromising public health to serve a "political agenda."
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Click here to read Daskalakis' full resignation letter.