Out CDC vaccine chief resigns, saying ‘enough is enough’ with Trump and RFK Jr.

Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, one of the nation’s most visible public health leaders and a longtime trusted voice for LGBTQ+ communities, has resigned from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He denounced what he describes as a wholesale dismantling of science under President Donald Trump’s Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

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Daskalakis posted his blistering resignation letter on X and Instagram on Wednesday evening. In it, he said he would step down as director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases on Thursday, citing irreconcilable ethical and scientific concerns.

“I am unable to serve in an environment that treats CDC as a tool to generate policies and materials that do not reflect scientific reality and are designed to hurt rather than to improve the public’s health,” Daskalakis wrote. "I find that the views he and his staff have shared challenge my ability to continue in my current role at the agency and in the service of the health of the American people. Enough is enough."

Related: How the CDC’s Dr. Demetre Daskalakis Stood on the Frontlines in 2021

Daskalakis condemned Kennedy’s HHS for sidelining career scientists, withholding data, and dictating immunization schedules that he said “threaten the lives of the youngest Americans and pregnant people.”

On Wednesday, the Food and Drug Administration approved updated COVID-19 vaccines from Pfizer, Moderna, and Novavax, but in a striking break with long-standing policy, narrowed eligibility almost exclusively to seniors and those with serious underlying health conditions like asthma or obesity. Healthy children under five were removed from Pfizer’s authorization for the first time since the vaccines became available. Moderna’s shot was restricted to only the youngest children with preexisting conditions.

Public health leaders immediately sounded alarms. The American Academy of Pediatrics called the new limits “deeply troubling,” warning that the abrupt policy shift risks confusing families, undermining vaccine confidence, and leaving children unprotected just as seasonal respiratory illnesses begin to surge.

The resignation is the most dramatic rupture yet between career scientists and the Trump administration, which has upended decades of vaccine policy, often announcing sweeping shifts through social media posts or opinion pieces. Daskalakis warned that “radical non-transparency” and “unskilled manipulation of data to achieve a political end” risks returning the country to a “pre-vaccine era where only the strong will survive.”

A gay infectious-disease physician known for his blunt candor and visible tattoos, Daskalakis rose to prominence as deputy health commissioner in New York City during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when he led aggressive outreach in queer communities. He later became director of the CDC’s Division of HIV and AIDS Prevention and was tapped by the Biden administration as deputy coordinator of the national mpox response in 2022, a role that brought him into the national spotlight.

Related: Why Are Conservatives Tearing Their Hair Out Over This Gay Doctor?

For years, Daskalakis has long been on the front lines of epidemics that disproportionately affect LGBTQ+ people. During the 2021 summer mpox outbreak in Provincetown, Massachusetts, he helped guide the CDC’s pandemic messaging. A year later, he became the White House’s go-to official on mpox, where he insisted on culturally competent outreach and equitable vaccine access. That work made him a target of right-wing media, which fixated on his sexuality, tattoos, and social media presence. Daskalakis shrugged off the attacks and continued to press for destigmatizing public health crises.

“The intentional eroding of trust in low-risk vaccines, favoring natural infection and unproven remedies, will bring us to a pre-vaccine era,” he wrote in his resignation letter. “Eugenics plays prominently in the rhetoric being generated and is derivative of a legacy that good medicine and science should continue to shun.”

Daskalakis’s decision came as part of a cascade of exits that have shaken the country’s top public health agency. Senate-confirmed CDC Director Susan Monarez was abruptly ousted after less than a month in the role, with her lawyers saying she had been targeted for refusing to “rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives” from Kennedy. Within hours, Chief Medical Officer Dr. Debra Houry and National Center for Emerging Zoonotic Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Daniel Jernigan also announced their resignations.

The Washington Post reports that Monarez had faced days of pressure from Kennedy and senior aides to support sweeping changes to the coronavirus vaccine policy and to dismiss her senior staff. When she refused, Kennedy demanded her resignation; she resisted, enlisting the support of Senate Health Committee Chair Bill Cassidy, a Republican who had backed Kennedy’s nomination in part on assurances about protecting vaccines. HHS later announced on social media that Monarez “is no longer director,” though her lawyers insist she was neither fired nor resigned.

In one of the most searing passages of his letter, Daskalakis highlighted his work with the queer community.

“For decades, I have been a trusted voice for the LGBTQ community when it comes to critical health topics,” he wrote. “I must also cite the recklessness of the administration in their efforts to erase transgender populations, cease critical domestic and international HIV programming, and terminate key research to support equity as part of my decision.”

Related: Monkeypox: 1-on-1 With the White House's Response Deputy Coordinator

He added that “public health is not merely about the health of the individual, but it is about the health of the community, the nation, the world. The nation’s health security is at risk and is in the hands of people focusing on ideological self-interest.”

At the CDC, subject-matter experts had not been permitted a single substantive briefing with the Secretary in the Trump administration’s first seven months, Daskalakis wrote. Instead, major policy changes have been rolled out in what he called “poorly scripted videos or page-long X posts,” leaving scientists scrambling to retrofit data to match political dictates.

He also linked his decision to the administration’s broader culture war agenda, saying Trump and his allies have “created an environment where violence like this can occur” — a reference to a recent shooting at CDC headquarters.

Daskalakis credited his resignation to his grandfather, who was killed resisting fascism in Greece. “I am resigning to make him and his legacy proud,” he wrote.

The CDC and HHS did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The Advocate has also reached out to Daskalakis.