When Demetre Daskalakis resigned as Director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at CDC, his letter to leadership carried a tone of finality and moral conviction. “Enough is enough,” he declared, explaining that Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s leadership had made it impossible for him to continue. The letter has been praised as principled, but when read closely it is less a defense of science than a portrait of the very rhetorical habits that drove the public away from CDC in the first place: appeals to authority, catastrophic predictions, ad hominem attacks, and factual distortions.
Consider his charge that he can no longer 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.”
This is a false dichotomy. It frames the choice as binary: either one accepts CDC’s “scientific reality,” or one is accused of designing policies to harm. Yet the last five years have shown what most Americans already know: what CDC has called “science” has often been neither transparent nor replicable, but political judgment dressed in a white coat.
Hellbound and Down 