In late August 2025, Demetre Daskalakis, CDC’s top immunization official, submitted his resignation letter. He was fed up as the nation’s vaccine system crumbled around him. That evening, he entered his eighth-floor office at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to collect mementos of a decades-long career in public health.
The room still bore the scars of an attack almost three weeks earlier by a gunman incensed by coronavirus vaccines: A bullet hole in the window, a fine dusting of shattered glass that covered the awards on his shelf. As he picked up one that honored his service at New York City’s health department, he cut his hand, drawing blood.
Daskalakis had uprooted his life in New York to join the CDC’s senior leadership in Atlanta for what he once saw as the pinnacle of a public health career. Then, he watched as the anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took charge of health agencies and undercut his life’s work.
Daskalakis watched with growing anger as Kennedy called public health agencies dishonest about vaccineswhen asked how to prevent another attack. He had spent months weighing whether to remain in his post overseeing vaccination for respiratory viruses, hoping to protect staff and the agency’s work. He reached his breaking point on Aug. 27, 2025, when the White House forced out CDC Director Susan Monarez, a career scientist who resisted Kennedy on vaccines.
“Enough is enough,” Daskalakis wrote that evening in a 1,200-word resignation letterthat accused the Trump administration of politicizing science.
He packed his awards into a duffel bag, including a large piece of glass from the floor. He felt sad leaving work he loved, but also a clarity that walking away was the only way to remain faithful to the principles that had defined his career.
The following day, he left the headquarters with two other top CDC leaders who had also resigned in protest. Hundreds of former and current CDC staff, stretching for blocks, surrounded them. Many ran up to give hugs and flowers. Some carried photos depicting the three as saints.
Daskalakis wrestled with the fear that leaving would make colleagues already under pressure feel less supported, depriving them of an ally willing to fight for them. He also worried that his departure would make it harder for the CDC to provide clear science-based guidance that millions of Americans rely on, from foodborne outbreaks and infectious diseases to the childhood immunization schedule.
But he ultimately saw staying as crossing a personal line and legitimizing the politicization of science.
Public health officials throughout Trump’s presidency, including during the covid-19 pandemic in his first term, faced a similar dilemma: whether stepping down would amplify their ability to speak out — or sideline them when their voices might matter most.
The question facing Daskalakis was more basic. What can such acts of resistance ultimately accomplish?
During the next year, Daskalakis spent months unsure what his resignation would amount to. He uprooted his life again looking for a job. He also became one of the administration’s most outspoken public health critics. The resignation letter he wrote that night surfaced in a consequential fight over Kennedy’s vaccine policies.
Whether any of it meant he had accomplished more by leaving than by staying proved harder to answer.
‘Like a chess game’
Daskalakis, 53, a D.C. native, wanted to become a doctor ever since his Greek immigrant parents gave him a Fisher-Price medical kit when he was a boy.
The outspoken infectious diseases physician started his career as a frontline doctor and became a prominent advocate for gay men’s health and an HIV-prevention leader who helped guide New York City’s response to HIV. He dispensed HIV prevention and sexual health advice on his personal Instagram page peppered with shirtless photos showing off his extensive tattoos, including an image across his abdomen of the resurrected Jesus wearing an elaborate crown, his hands elevated in a blessing.
He first joined the CDC under President Joe Biden to lead its HIV/AIDS division, but his responsibilities quickly grew. He co-led the national response to a 2022 outbreak of mpox, previously known as monkeypox, largely affecting gay men. Then he took charge of the agency’s immunization and respiratory diseases center, a pivotal role as the country shifted to treating coronavirus as more of an endemic threat. CDC was no longer in full-scale crisis mode, but the agency was navigating skepticism about vaccines and public health authority.
When Kennedy gave his first speech to staff after taking office in 2025, Daskalakis held out cautious hope that he could work with his new boss. He expected that he and his team could brief Kennedy on measles, flu and covid-19.
Daskalakis never got that meeting. Instead, he spent the following months trying to anticipate Kennedy’s moves and limit their damage — and it got harder each time. “It was like a chess game,” he said.
In February, Kennedy wanted to push an unproven Vitamin A treatment for measles as an outbreak struck West Texas. Daskalakis and other leaders managed to keep it out of a CDC alert to doctors.
In May, Kennedy bypassed career scientists to announce the CDC no longer recommended covid vaccines for healthy children and pregnant women. Daskalakis’s team crafted deliberately ambiguous language on the CDC website so doctors could still feel comfortable administering the shot.
In June, Kennedy hired allies from the anti-vaccine movements to fulfill his longtime goal of removing a preservative from flu shots. Daskalakis and a team of officials worked on a document reaffirming the preservative’s safety by summarizing research, but Kennedy’s office quickly ordered its removal from the CDC website. The administration moved forward with banning the preservative and questioned more than a dozen CDC staff to find out who was behind the document. Daskalakis recalled an official telling him the document was seen as “an act of aggression to make the secretary look dumb.”
Still, Daskalakis stayed — hoping that Monarez would be a bulwark against political inference.
But that possibility vanished when she was forced out after, by her account, refusing to be a rubber-stamp to Kennedy’s vaccine policies.
“I am unable to serve in an environment that treats CDC as a tool to generate politics and materials that do not reflect scientific reality and are designed to hurt rather than to improve the public’s health,” Daskalakis wrote in his searing resignation letter posted on X, at one point accusing Kennedy of promoting eugenics.
An intense backlash followed.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) said the physician had “no business being in government” because of his “lifestyle,” citing Daskalakis’s public embrace of kink culture, including bondage. Calley Means, then a White House adviser to Kennedy on health, said Daskalakis encouraged “orgies as a normal ‘Friday night’ activity.”
After leaving the CDC, Daskalakis reported to Atlanta police that he was inundated with antigay comments and threats of violence. He also filed a report with the Department of Homeland Security, but said officials told him their options were limited unless the threats became more concrete.
DHS said other agencies were the appropriate ones to handle threats of that nature.
The threats were unsettling, but not new. Daskalakis has dealt for years with being bullied, about his immigrant background growing up, and later, over sexual orientation. He often cites his grandfather and namesake, who fought in the Greek resistance during World War II, as a reminder not to be intimidated.
A different kind of exposure
During Trump’s first administration, health officials such as Deborah Birx, coordinator of the coronavirus task force, remained in the administration even as she appeared aghast at moments when the president suggested injecting disinfectant to beat the virus. Years later, she argued that she was able to do more to protect Americans by staying rather than resigning and losing her influence.
Jerome Adams, Trump’s first surgeon general who has since become a fierce critic of Trump’s pandemic response, said in a text message that “everyone’s moral and emotional/mental health tolerances are different, and some may rightly choose to serve or stay while others leave.”
“There is no single correct path,” he added.
Daskalakis was suddenly juggling a new role as an outspoken critic of federal vaccine policy and the realities of life outside government. He had no job and no certainty about where he and his husband of 13 years would live.
Daskalakis found himself in a new role: explaining Kennedy’s vaccine agenda from the outside.
The day before the September 2025 meeting of federal vaccine advisers to revisit the hepatitis B shot given to newborns, his phone buzzed nonstop as reporters reached out. From a chair in the corner of his bedroom, his new office, he reviewed the material to be discussed at the meeting. (He joked that he was able to figure out how to download the PowerPoints, tasks his executive assistant used to handle.)
On a call with a health reporter, he described the hepatitis B proposal as “apeshit crazy.” Newborns can contract hepatitis B from household contacts who might not know they are infected, he told her.
At the same time, he was putting off a call with his health insurance agent even though his coverage would expire in 11 days.
After a rare break for a salad and Diet Coke at a nearby restaurant, he rushed home to prepare for the first of several television interviews that day. He pulled on a striped shirt, tie and black jacket over gym shorts and sandals.
He posted on X a long recap of the two-day meeting that ended with the advisers postponing a vote. He noted the panel did not conduct the analysis of data that typically takes place before a change to vaccine guidelines.
“When scientific process is not followed, the science that make the foundation for decisions is suspect and the decisions are therefore not valid,” he wrote the day after the meeting. The vaccine panel had “become an ideology machine,” he wrote. “I stand by my justification for resignation. Sending strength to the scientists being held hostage at CDC.”
Private uncertainty, public praise
Daskalakis’s increasingly pointed critiques of decisions emerging from CDC came to be seen as attacks on the institution itself.
Some agency staff were initially upset that his criticism of the CDC — including saying it could no longer be trusted — did not distinguish between political leaders and career scientists, he said.
“The ‘you can’t trust anything the CDC says anymore’ was a bit hurtful,” said one CDC career scientist who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share private concerns.
Daskalakis acknowledges that some people inside CDC felt he was damaging the institution. His response was to change the order of the argument.
“I used to say CDC can’t be trusted, comma, and the career scientists that are on the inside are doing amazing work …” he said. “So I flipped it and say the career scientists inside CDC are doing amazing work, but the agency can’t be trusted because it’s hijacked.”
That night, Daskalakis sat in a Chelsea hotel room in gym clothes, drinking a sugar-free Red Bull. On his laptop, he watched a recording of the advisory committee meeting.
He already knew where it was headed.
The following day, the panel voted to abandon a decades-old recommendation that all newborns receive a hepatitis B vaccine at birth, the first significant alteration of the childhood immunization schedule since Kennedy became health secretary.
Months earlier, Daskalakis would have been inside the system, trying to influence the outcome. Now he saw his role differently.
Scientists still inside CDC, he said later, were sending him “smoke signals” for help.
When concerns reached him, such as dropping the hepatitis B birth dose, he tried to amplify them.
After that vote, Daskalakis blasted the committee as “a wolf in sheep’s clothing” in a message to The Washington Post. On X, he posted, “Science is defeated yet again by the zombi ACIP. Oust this committee. Congress need to act now.”
But from the outside, Daskalakis could only sound the alarm. The recommendation went forward.
Back to patients
It has been more than a year since Daskalakis left government. He has traded conference rooms at CDC for a clinic in New York. But he remains deeply engaged in the public health fights that drove him out.
His television appearances have become far less frequent since the period immediately after his resignation. But Daskalakis still speaks on social media and is regularly quoted challenging Kennedy in articles.
When the Trump administration announced changes to the childhood immunization schedule — in January, May and again in August — Daskalakis called them dangerous and political theater.
When Ebola and hantavirus emerged as new challenges for federal health officials this spring, Daskalakis wrote on Xin May, “Let’s see if they can solve this with a quip on a podcast.”
He remains unsparing in his assessment of the agency’s political leadership.
He was skeptical when audio leaked of the new CDC director, Erica Schwartz,assuring staff in August that she would speak truth to power and tell Kennedy when she disagreed with him — but privately, not in front of media.
“Speaking truth to power behind closed doors assumes that the power listens and reinforces the fallacy that public health works best when it is invisible,” he postedon social media. “That’s how we got into this pickle.”
Emily Hilliard, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services, defended Schwartz and the administration’s approach, saying the CDC director “highly values all CDC scientists and staff” and engages with them daily.
She added that HHS is focused on a mission to reform a “public health establishment that had lost Americans’ trust” rather than “litigating a former official’s grievances and disputed recollections through the press.”
Speaking out did not immediately stop Kennedy’s vaccine policies. But Daskalakis’s resignation letter became part of a lawsuit that for now, has put many of them on hold. In December, the American Academy of Pediatrics and other medical groups cited his criticisms of Kennedy bypassing traditional scientific processes in an update to their lawsuit challenging the health secretary’s vaccine agenda.
Three months later, in March, a federal judge found officials unlawfully altered vaccine policy. The judge temporarily blocked much of Kennedy’s overhaul to the childhood immunization schedule, including the hepatitis B newborn dose. The administration has appealed.
Daskalakis and his husband have returned to Brooklyn. He is the chief medical officer at Callen-Lorde, the New York community health center that grew out of the AIDS epidemic and became one of the country’s best-known providers of LGBTQ+ health care.
One day a week, he is back caring for patients, splitting his time between an underserved community in the Bronx and a clinic in Chelsea — a return to the kind of medicine that first drew him into public health.
The shift might seem like a retreat from the national stage. Daskalakis sees it differently.
He has lost faith in the leadership of the CDC, but still has faith in the scientists and career civil servants.
The country still needs a national agency to take the lead in global health, to coordinate responses to outbreaks that cross state lines, he said. But he believes more authority and accountability should rest with state and local health departments.
“Let’s build the next thing,” Daskalakis said. “Because there’s nothing there that you can fix.”
For Daskalakis, rebuilding public health now starts closer to the ground — in clinics, neighborhoods and on the front line, closer to the people public health is supposed to serve.
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