The growing liberal outrage against Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. after a handful of resignations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does not cut to the heart of the crisis at the CDC. That happened because the previous health “experts” destroyed the agency’s credibility and ultimately invited Kennedy’s transformation.
This latest outrage cycle started when President Donald Trump fired CDC Director Susan Monarez, leading to the resignation of four top CDC officials. One of those four, Demetre Daskalakis, has begun doing the rounds as liberal media’s Resistance hero of the week. But it is health officials like Daskalakis who betrayed the public’s trust in public health “experts,” and a quick look through his history shows that.
BYRON YORK SAYS CDC TURMOIL WAS ‘A GIVEN’
Daskalakis was President Joe Biden‘s deputy response coordinator for monkeypox. You may recall that that disease was spread in the U.S. primarily among “men who have sex with other men,” and among their social circles. Daskalakis was focused on “intentionally” addressing “stigma” about the disease primarily spreading among gay men. Telling those men to refrain from having sex with random men to avoid monkeypox would be stigmatizing. In Daskalakis’s words, “One person’s idea of risk is another person’s idea of a great festival or Friday night.” In order to further avoid stigma, Daskalakis and other “experts” also began referring to monkeypox as “mpox,” lest someone be offended.
He was not alone in this approach of focusing more on “stigma” than on the transmission of the disease. Hawaii’s health officials were worried about it being labeled a “gay disease,” saying that, while it “appears to be spreading now among some sexual and social networks of gay and bisexual men and other men who have sex with men (MSM),” anyone could get it, including “including heterosexual people, women, transgender and nonbinary people.”
Dr. Allison Arwady, the commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health, offered the same message and said any “tight-knit social network” was at risk, even as her department prioritized promiscuous gay men for monkeypox vaccinations. As of a month-and-a-half ago, Arwady was the director of the CDC’s Injury Center.
The New York City Health Department reassigned Dr. Don Weiss after he urged the city to advise men to temporarily limit the number of men with whom they were having sex. The city instead advised those men to cover their monkeypox sores during sex and avoid kissing. Anything more would be too “stigmatizing.”
Back to Demetre Daskalakis, a look at his resignation letter shows him to be a progressive ideologue who prioritizes his ideology over public health. He boasted about his resignation making his grandfather proud because his grandfather had fought against fascist forces in Greece. (Get it? Trump is also a fascist!) He accused Trump of “efforts to erase transgender populations” and referred to pregnant women as “pregnant people.” This high-ranking “public health official” believes that men can become pregnant. Is it any surprise people voted for the guy who would tear down and rebuild the institution that gave someone like that so much power?
Employing and promoting Daskalakis was not the CDC’s only sin. Former CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said in 2021 that the Biden administration was looking into imposing a federal COVID vaccine mandate. She ended up walking that back and declaring that there would be “no federal mandate,” only for Biden to turn around two months later and attempt to impose one anyway. Walensky also said in February 2021 that data suggested teachers didn’t need to be vaccinated to return to in-person instruction, only to walk that back after the Biden administration rejected it. Her CDC instead announced that 95% of the country shouldn’t return to in-person instruction.
Those flip-flops showed that the CDC was not operating based on science and was not being honest with people throughout the pandemic. The latter flip on in-person schooling can be chalked up to the Biden administration’s devotion to teachers unions, who were the biggest obstacles to getting children back in schools. In fact, the CDC worked hand-in-hand with the presidents of the nation’s two largest teachers unions to write strict COVID restrictions, including mandated masking for children and teachers. The CDC continued to push forced masking of children into 2022.
False claims and anti-science restrictions plagued the CDC during the pandemic. Walensky claimed in March 2021 that vaccinated people “do not carry the virus,” which was not true. She also claimed masking would be seasonal and go on indefinitely. That effect continues to resonate among health “experts” today, as Yolo County health officials are urging a return to masking now, in September 2025, as COVID continues to bounce around California.
The results of the unnecessary mask mandates and vaccine mandates, particularly on children, can be seen in the decline in vaccination rates. The CDC and other health “experts” misled people on what would keep them safe and healthy and what would not. That misleading guidance was sometimes even deliberate, as Dr. Anthony Fauci admitted that he said “there is no reason to be walking around with a mask” at the start of the pandemic because he wanted to make sure there were masks for healthcare workers. Fauci, who declared his guidance to come from science itself, and that anyone who opposed him and his subsequent public flip-flopping on masking was “really attacking not only Dr. Anthony Fauci — you’re attacking science.”
That attitude was pervasive in the public health establishment. After all, the CDC was staffed full of people like Daskalakis, who went along with every anti-science proposal and incoherent, back-and-forth guidance changes put forward by Walensky. Trust in vaccines declined. Trust in the CDC declined. Voters wanted a new path forward, and so they chose to bring Trump back from the political grave.
That is how you end up with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. reforming public health agencies in his image. Kennedy is his own kind of disaster. He is, first and foremost, a Democrat, which explains his anti-vaccine conspiracy theories that would be right at home in liberal Hollywood. The man Kennedy appointed to lead his federal study on the causes of autism used puberty blockers on children with autism. Kennedy is an anti-GMO environmentalist, and Trump himself has admitted that Kennedy has “some pretty crazy ideas.”
HOW THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF PEDIATRICS UNDERMINES PUBLIC TRUST
But Kennedy is the symptom of the disastrous past five years of public health failures, driven by ideologues like Daskalakis, easily-influenced leaders like Walensky, and arrogant liars like Fauci. Voters wanted the CDC and the public health bureaucracy to be torn down, which is why they voted to bring back Trump. Now, Kennedy is doing his own damage to the public health bureaucracy, but he is also ensuring that the Walenskys and the Daskalakises of the world no longer use the CDC to manipulate people under the guise of science.
The mess Kennedy leaves behind will undoubtedly need to be cleaned up in a few years’ time, but the hubris of public health bureaucrats at the CDC and elsewhere made such a teardown necessary in the first place. The public health bureaucracy had been rotting from the inside for some time, and the pandemic brought all of that to light. Public health officials concerned with Kennedy’s leadership now have no one to blame but themselves and their colleagues for showing voters that dramatic changes were needed.