Former CDC official ‘only sees harm’ to public health under RFK Jr’s leadership | Trump administration

The former director of vaccinations for centers for disease control and prevention warned the future of American health under the direction of Donald Trump, Robert F Kennedy Jr.

In an interview on Sunday with ABC, Demeter Daskalakis – who resigned this week to protest against the dismissal by the White House of the CDC director, Susan Monarez – said: “From my point of view as a doctor who has taken the oath of Hippocrates, I only see evil.”

He then added: “I may be mistaken, but on the basis of what I see, on the basis of what I heard with the new members of the Advisory Committee for Vaccination Practices, or ACIP, they really move in an ideological direction where they want to see the defeat of vaccination.”

The interview with Daskalakis intervenes in the middle of growing chaos through American health agencies and the rare Bipartisian reverses to the dismissal of Monarez by the White House, which came in the midst of abrupt budget cuts of the CDC work as well as growing concerns of political interference.

There have also been growing public calls to the resignation of Kennedy, especially since he continued to make questionable medical and health allegations – and to be castigated in response by experts and legislators.

Explaining his resignation, Daskalakis said: “I did not think that we were going to be able to present science in a free way of ideology, that the firewall between science and ideology has completely broken down. And the fact of not having a scientific leader in the CDC meant that we could not be able to have good public health. ”

Daskalakis has also criticized Kennedy recent changes to the COVVI-19 vaccine calendar of childhood, noting that the vaccine is currently approved only for people aged 65 and over, as well as for children and adults suffering from underlying health problems.

“This is not what the data shows. From six months to two years old, their underlying state is young people. 53% of these children hospitalized last season did not have underlying conditions. The data say that in this age group, you should vaccinate your child. I understand that everyone does not do so, but they have limited access by narrowing this recommendation. The insurance may not cover it,” said Daskalakis.

He also questioned Jim O’Neill, the new CDC chief who was a high -level assistant in Kennedy and has no training in medicine or science of infectious diseases.

In response to the question of knowing if he trusted O’Neill by saying that he is in favor of vaccines, Daskalakis said: “Honestly, I really want to trust him … But on the basis of the very first article that I saw on X where he says that CDC scientists have manipulated data to be able to follow an ideology or an agenda in the child’s calendar.

In an editorial on Saturday for the New York Times, the Senator of Vermont Bernie Sanders accused Kennedy of having “endangered the health of the American people now and in the future”, adding: “He must resign”.

Since he has assumed leadership in the Health Department, Kennedy – a long -standing anti -vaccine defender – has dismissed workers from the health agency and enterti of conspiracy theories. Last week, more than 750 current and former employees of American health agencies signed a letter in which they criticized Kennedy as an “existential threat to public health”.

The workers of the health agency then accused the Secretary of Health of being “accomplice of dismantling the American public health infrastructure and of endangering the health of the country by disseminating in short health information”.

The letter comes after a fatal shooting at the CDC headquarters in Atlanta earlier this month, when a 30-year-old armed man drew more than 180 laps in the buildings, killing a police officer before dying from a self-inflicted ball injury. The shooter had mental health problems and was influenced by the disinformation which led him to believe that the COVVI-19 vaccine made him sick, according to the father of the shooter.