On Thursday evening, Dr. Demetre Daskalakis—who recently resigned from a high-level role at the Centers for Disease Control—revealed a jarring fact about Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. According to Daskalakis, Kennedy has never been briefed by any of the center’s scientists on major diseases.
Daskalakis was one of numerous top CDC officials to leave their post this week after Kennedy fired the agency’s director for refusing to “rubberstamp unscientific, reckless directives and fire dedicated health experts,” per the ousted director’s lawyers. Stepping down as director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory, Daskalakis cited the CDC’s transformation under RFK Jr. into 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.”
During a Thursday CNN appearance, Daskalakis advised senators to ask Kennedy at his appearance before the Senate Finance Committee next week: “Has he been ever briefed by a CDC expert on anything—on, specifically, measles, Covid-19, flu?” Asked whether RFK has indeed ever received such a briefing, Daskalakis replied, “The answer is no. So no one from my center has ever briefed him on any of those topics.”
“He’s getting information from somewhere, but that information is not coming from CDC experts,” Daskalakis continued. “CDC is the preeminent public health organization, I’m going to say, in the world. And he’s not taking us up on several offers to brief him on these very important topics.” Asked why, he raised the possibility that Kennedy “has alternate experts that he may trust more than the experts at CDC that the rest of the world regards as the best scientists in the areas.”
The startling revelation comes as Kennedy’s dangerous incompetence as health secretary faces increasing scrutiny. On Thursday, the American Public Health Association issued a statement condemning Kennedy’s move to fire the CDC director, as well as his dangerous anti-vaccine sentiments and actions, and his other “misguided efforts to overhaul the public health system based on myths and pseudoscience.”
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