RFK Jr. can’t do math, former top CDC scientist says, and Pete Hegseth should stick to pushups

One of the country’s most prominent public health leaders is openly mocking two of President Donald Trump’s top Cabinet officials, accusing Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth of replacing science with ideology and turning public health into a performance of quackery.

Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, chief medical officer at Callen-Lorde Community Health Center in New York City and a former senior official at both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the White House, sharply criticized Kennedy’s defense of Trump’s mathematically impossible claim that prescription drug prices had fallen by “600 percent” and Hegseth’s move to end the military’s long-standing annual flu shot requirement.

“The distortion of math seems in line with the rest of RFK Jr.’s creative scientific accounting,” Daskalakis, who resigned as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases last fall, told The Advocate. “It should be another clear sign that this is not a serious person and harkens to the Orwellian reality in which we live. Doublespeak and distortion is the currency in which the secretary functions. Bad for science, bad for health.”

Daskalakis also made the criticism public on Instagram after Kennedy repeated the claim Thursday, beside Trump, in the Oval Office. Reposting video of the exchange to his Instagram story, he wrote, “Well, this is something.”

Related: Federal judge unloads on ‘unserious’ RFK Jr., says anti-trans policy showed his ‘cruelty’

In a follow-up slide, Daskalakis broke down the math himself: “[(500-100)/500]x100 = 80%,” adding, “It’s an 80% price drop.” He continued: “600% price drop would be -$2500, which is impossible unless that means they pay you to take the drug.”

His remarks came after a week in which the administration’s top health and defense officials found themselves at the center of separate but connected controversies over science, medicine, and what critics describe as an increasingly performative display of toughness.

Kennedy has already been publicly rebuked by the courts for what one federal judge described as both cruelty and unserious leadership. Last week, U.S. District Judge Mustafa T. Kasubhai struck down Kennedy’s attempt to restrict gender-affirming care for transgender youth, writing that “unserious leaders are unsafe” and concluding that when Kennedy acted outside the law, “he acts with cruelty.”

On Monday, Hegseth announced that active duty service members would no longer be required to receive the annual influenza vaccine, ending a policy the Pentagon has treated for decades as a readiness issue rather than a matter of personal preference. Calling the decision one of “medical autonomy,” Hegseth told troops that their “body, faith, and convictions are not negotiable.”

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

Related: Dr. Demetre Daskalakis on leaving the CDC and calling out RFK Jr.

The same image politics has followed both men for months. Kennedy and Hegseth have repeatedly leaned into public fitness stunts, including the widely shared “Pete and Bobby Challenge,” a pull-up-and-push-up competition at the Pentagon in which they raced to complete 50 pull-ups and 100 push-ups in under 10 minutes. Kennedy later explained why he performed the challenge in jeans, saying it had become part of his workout routine, while Hegseth and Pentagon social media accounts promoted the broader message that U.S. forces should be “FIT — NOT FAT.”

Kennedy has also posted shirtless workout videos with Kid Rock under his “Make America Healthy Again” branding, while Hegseth has drawn mockery for a steady stream of gym videos and weightlifting clips even during moments of military crisis. Critics have argued the performances feel less like federal policy and more like an exaggerated effort to project masculinity and toughness.

Public health experts warned that Hegseth’s rollback of flu shots will make troops more vulnerable to outbreaks in close-quarter settings such as barracks, ships, and submarines, where influenza can spread rapidly and sideline units. The military has required annual flu vaccinations for decades because infectious disease has long been treated as a national security issue, shaped in part by the devastating toll of the 1918 influenza pandemic on U.S. troops.

Then on Wednesday, Kennedy faced Sen. Elizabeth Warren during a Senate hearing over Trump’s repeated claim that his administration had reduced prescription drug prices by “400, 500, and even 600 percent.”

Warren pointed out that a 600 percent reduction would mean drugmakers were effectively paying patients to take medicine.

Kennedy responded by saying Trump has “a different way of calculating,” arguing that if a drug rose from $100 to $600, lowering it back down represented a “600 percent savings.” In reality, a jump from $100 to $600 is a 500 percent increase, and a drop from $600 to $100 is an 83.3 percent decrease.

On Thursday, standing beside Trump in the Oval Office during an event with pharmaceutical executives, Kennedy repeated the same argument. Trump agreed and added that there were “two ways of calculating it.”

The White House and allies, including CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz, have tried to defend the broader point by arguing that Americans pay far more for prescription drugs than patients in Europe and Canada. But critics say that does not excuse top officials defending obviously false math.

Kennedy, whose long history of vaccine skepticism shadowed his confirmation, has already drawn criticism for halting a CDC flu vaccine ad campaign.

For Daskalakis, the larger problem is what these moments signal about how the administration governs: a willingness to trade evidence for ideology and public confidence for political theater.

At a moment when measles outbreaks are on the rise, childhood vaccination rates are declining, and trust in public health institutions remains fragile, critics say the administration is sending a dangerous message that expertise is optional, evidence is flexible, and even basic math can be rewritten if it serves the politics of the moment.

“Secretary Hegseth and Kennedy should stick to pullups and pushups and not weaken the immunity of the military to make an illogical ideological point that makes our troops susceptible to severe flu and to knock them out of their important role protecting us,” he said.

Watch RFK Jr.'s bizarre math explanation in the Oval Office below.

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