Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, who recently resigned from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, completely unloaded on Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., claiming there is “public evidence” of his intentions to “interfere with the science at CDC.”
Daskalakis resigned alongside fellow doctors and officials Deb Houry and Dan Jernigan on Thursday, citing changes to the agency’s vaccine advisory board and other vaccine policies.
That same day, Kennedy told reporters the agency has been “very troubled for a very long time,” calling their recommendations during the COVID-19 pandemic “not science” and “misinformation.”
“I think that if the CDC is being characterized as troubled by Secretary Kennedy, I think we have to turn the mirror back to him because I think that the trouble is emanating mainly from him,” Daskalakis told CNN’s “The Source” host Kaitlan Collins Thursday.
Daskalakis went on to say Kennedy‘s “clear statement that experts should not be trusted really makes it seem unlikely that his mission for CDC is to be a bastion of scientific expertise.”
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He defended the CDC’s progress following the pandemic, but says Kennedy is now dismantling that work. His comments come at a time when his former agency and the health department are undergoing a series of drastic changes to adopt alternative health approaches.
So far, the Department of Health and Human Services has lost roughly 13,000 employees. Earlier this week, Susan Monarez was fired from her position as CDC director less than a month into her role, and Kennedy, a vaccine skeptic, removed every member of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to replace them with his own controversial picks.
“CDC does not have bias. On the contrary, the people that have been installed by Secretary Kennedy are full of ideology and bias that will actually contaminate the science,” Daskalakis said.
When asked if people can trust what is coming out of the CDC, Houry said, “if it’s coming from CDC scientists, you can trust it. If it’s coming from the administration and hasn’t been cleared by CDC scientists or reviewed by it, then I would have concerns.”
Kennedy is set to testify before a Senate panel next week, but Daskalakis said lawmakers should ask if he has ever been “briefed by a CDC expert on anything, specifically measles, COVID-19, flu.”
“No one from my center has ever briefed him on any of those topics so I don’t know where he’s getting his—” Daskalakis said before a surprised Collins interjected, “Really?”
“Yeah, he’s getting information from somewhere, but that information is not coming from CDC experts, who really are the world’s experts in this area,” Daskalakis said.
He told Collins that he does not know why Kennedy has not picked his team “up on several offers to brief him on these very important topics,” adding that, “perhaps he 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 Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s requests for comment.