Enough Is Enough: What a CDC Resignation Letter Reveals

Enough Is Enough: What a CDC Resignation Letter Reveals
by James Lyons-Weiler at Brownstone Institute

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. 

He accuses the new HHS of narrative enforcement, when, in reality, CDC has become infamous for the same partly on his watch. Lockdowns, school closures, and vaccine mandates were not the inevitable products of neutral science — they were policy choices, frequently contradicted by the very data the CDC refused to release. Kennedy did not cause that collapse of trust. Power overreach and failed policy did.

Still, Daskalakis appeals to institutional sanctity: “unvetted and conflicted outside organizations seem to be the sources HHS use over the gold standard science of CDC.” But the claim that CDC represents “gold standard science” rings hollow. The agency’s failures are well documented: contaminated Covid tests that delayed early detection, failure to use standard qRT-PCR to control for false positives, shifting guidance on masks that left the public whiplashed, withheld vaccine safety data buried in VAERS and VSD, and FOIA evasions that stonewalled independent scrutiny. To describe this record as “gold standard science” is an appeal to authority wholly unsupported by the evidence.

The catastrophism in his letter is striking but rings hollow. He warns that Kennedy’s policies will “bring us to a pre-vaccine era where only the strong will survive and many if not all will suffer.” He’s pretending that Kennedy has said he wants no vaccines for anyone. This is a combined fallacy: false dichotomy and slippery slope. Questioning the safety of excipients, the timing, number, or necessity of vaccines does not condemn the country to Darwinian misery. 

In fact, mortality from infectious diseases like measles, pertussis, and diphtheria had already declined long before mass vaccination, thanks to sanitation, nutrition, and reduced exposure to livestock reservoirs. The fact of loss of protection due to waning immunity is not found in his resignation. Balanced debate about risks and benefits does not mean “returning to the dark ages.” It means practicing science as it should be — open, skeptical, and transparent and will full accountability on scientific claims.

At points, the rhetoric becomes openly hostile. ACIP members are dismissed as “people of dubious intent and more dubious scientific rigor,” and Kennedy himself is cast as an “authoritarian leader.” These are ad hominem attacks, not arguments. They dismiss individuals rather than engage with data or reasoning.

I’ve worked with Secretary Kennedy long enough to know him as a sensitive, thoughtful, non-reactionary, considerate leader. He is so considerate it can at times nearly irk his underlings who would like to see him come to decisions faster. But that’s because they have already made up their minds. Kennedy works arbitrarily and uses contrarianism – debate, adversarial set-ups – to hammer out the details until the description of a problem and its solution fits the mold. I’ve never heard of anyone spun out of his orbit for doing due diligence-based dissent. Meanwhile, Daskalakis pines for the old “following the leader” model of authoritarian “trust the science” CDC. Those days are gone.

The gravest claim in the letter is that “eugenics plays prominently in the rhetoric being generated.” Daskalakis gives us no quotations, policies, or documents. Sometimes words just sound right when one is upset, I suppose. Ironically, the accusation is not only unsubstantiated but inverted. Kennedy has consistently warned against coercive health policies and corporate capture, both of which he argues worsen inequality. To portray his emphasis on transparency and medical freedom as eugenics is a straw man — a distortion intended to silence rather than to debate.

Daskalakis goes further, blaming Kennedy for violence: “I am resigning because of the cowardice of a leader that cannot admit that his and his minions’ words over decades created an environment where violence like this can occur.” 

This refers to a shooting at CDC. Again, no hint of evidence has been offered by Daskalakis or anyone else to connect Kennedy’s words to the crime. It is a post hoc fallacy, exploiting tragedy to smear a political opponent. It’s shameless and ripens the fruit of his letter to rot.

Perhaps most jarring is his claim that Kennedy’s HHS has sought to “erase transgender populations, cease critical domestic and international HIV programming, and terminate key research to support equity.” 

The rhetoric here is catastrophic, baseless, and false. In reality, under Dr. Jay Bhattacharya’s leadership, the NIH has made HIV a top research priority. Far from “ceasing HIV programming,” Kennedy’s administration has pledged to tackle the epidemic with fresh eyes, free from the pharmaceutical capture that distorted earlier approaches. To suggest otherwise is not just hyperbole; it is disinformation.

Daskalakis also insists he has “always been first to challenge scientific dogma.” His self-nomination as a leader in this activity is again unsupported by evidence. Did Daskalakis speak up when Moderna and Pfizer inflated their efficacy estimates? Did Daskalakis write a letter of complaint when CDC reported that 20 layers of cloth masks, no 16, no, thank you Dr. Fauci, only 1 layer of cloth mask was sufficient to stop the SARS-CoV-2 virus in its tracks? I could go on, but the answer is not one peep from this challenger of dogma.

And yet, in practice, his defense of CDC orthodoxy shows the opposite. The real challenger of dogma has been Kennedy, who has questioned the sacred cows of American public health — vaccine trial design, regulatory capture, chronic disease drivers, and the silencing of dissent. What Daskalakis calls “dogma” is only that which challenges the CDC. What he calls “science” is whatever the CDC itself declares. Policy-first narrative enforcement activities.

None of this is to deny the human element. Daskalakis thanks his colleagues as “dedicated professionals committed to improving the health and well-being of communities across the nation.” 

Burnout and disillusionment are real, and his sense of betrayal is palpable. But compassion must extend beyond the walls of the CDC. For decades, the American people have suffered from rising chronic illness. Six in ten live with at least one chronic disease. Life expectancy has declined relative to peer nations. Autoimmune conditions, autism, and metabolic disorders have surged. To claim that Kennedy caused mistrust is to invert reality: mistrust grew because what CDC did was not science but policy, enforced without transparency, accountability, or humility.

The refrain “enough is enough” was meant as a rebuke of Kennedy’s HHS. But for the American people, it applies first and foremost to the CDC itself. Enough of secrecy disguised as science. Enough of fear-based rhetoric to silence dissent. Enough of sanctimony about “gold standards” while health outcomes decline due to medicine optimized to proxy outcomes. Kennedy’s critics mistake his reforms for authoritarianism when, in fact, they are the first genuine challenge to authoritarian policy disguised as medicine.

The resignation of a career official should not be mocked. But it should be read for what it is: a defense of a failed paradigm, framed as a moral stand. The task ahead is not to preserve the CDC’s aura; that is undeserved. It is instead to put public health on a foundation of honesty, openness, and freedom worthy of trust. That — not resignation letters steeped in fallacy — is what will truly make America healthy again.

Enough Is Enough: What a CDC Resignation Letter Reveals
by James Lyons-Weiler at Brownstone Institute – Daily Economics, Policy, Public Health, Society