There has been a lot of manufactured turmoil at CDC over the last week. High ranking employees have left or been fired and there is insubordination in the air. Americans aren't quite certain what to make of the goings on.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a law professor at the University of Tennessee and the founder of the InstaPundit.com blog. He has published his analysis of CDC's predicament:
https://nypost.com/2025/09/02/opinion/the-cdcs-in-your-face-double-standards-lost-americas-trust/
The CDC’s in-your-face double standards lost America’s trust — winning it back will be tough
By Glenn H. Reynolds - September 2, 2025Once again, our governing “elites” are illustrating their cluelessness about just how low the public’s opinion of them has sunk, and why.
The latest example involves Demetre Daskalakis, former director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, who rage-quit his post last week after his bosses, noting the pandemic “emergency” is long over, ended special rules allowing for broad use of the COVID-19 shot.
“This is where fascism lives,” Daskalakis angrily declared as he and other Centers for Disease Control officials stalked off their jobs.
“Fascism” seems to be this administration’s most over-diagnosed ailment, applied with abandon to anything the left doesn’t like.
But Daskalakis’, uh, fevered response is exactly what you don’t want from a public health official.
In fact, given widespread public doubts about the COVID jab and the general debacle of the CDC’s COVID response, the last thing we need is a hysterical and politically extreme figure in charge of immunizations.
We need someone steady, sensible, respectable and respected in that job — but what we got with Daskalakis was another lefty theater kid putting on a show.
This is a man who made himself famous by posing on a magazine cover wearing a leather pentagram harness, and showed off his bondage-gear collection in numerous publicly distributed photos.
Daskalakis ran the Biden administration’s weak response to the monkeypox outbreak — pushing to rename the illness “mpox” for reasons of political correctness.
Although he and other government experts were aware that the disease was spreading mostly via sex parties in the gay community, they chose to downplay that fact for fear of “stigma” and pretend that every American was equally at risk.
“Political correctness and a desire not to offend drove the messaging and public health response,” the Oversight Project, a government watchdog, found in 2023: “Officials were primarily concerned with not stigmatizing (mpox carriers), the exact opposite of the COVID response.”
Yes: During COVID, the CDC ordered us to stand aside as our loved ones died alone in hospitals, and made us postpone or downsize weddings and funerals.
Based on CDC guidance, states and cities canceled our church services and even punished us for going outdoors without masks.
But monkeypox was different: “You know, one person’s idea of risk is another person’s idea of a great festival or Friday night,” Daskalakis said breezily as he explained why the CDC didn’t order the shutdown of gatherings where mpox was spreading.
“So we have to sort of embrace that with joy.”
As Will Chamberlain noted on X, “The CDC is utterly useless if it is not seen as credible by the majority of the country, and yet they employed a guy with massive satanic tattoos who wore bondage gear during a photo shoot as their point person on immunization.”
Daskalakis’ antics may seem delightfully edgy to members of our governing class, but they play very differently with the normal-American community.
It seemed deliberately provocative to choose the gay bondage guy as the face of the agency’s immunization PR at a time of spreading skepticism about modern vaccines.
Then again, Biden put cross-dressing luggage thief Sam Brinton in charge of nuclear waste, so I guess it was par for the course.
But now we have a new administration, with new priorities.
DEI programs of the sort loved by the prior administration stress “cultural competence,” but its practitioners never bother to demonstrate competence in the nation’s mainstream culture.
When that comes back to bite you it isn’t “fascism,” but the wages of narcissistic political ineptitude.
Of course, these problems might be forgivable if the CDC was, you know, good at its actual job.
But it’s not.
This was demonstrated in its shambolic response to Ebola a decade ago, and much more dramatically demonstrated in its equally shambolic response to COVID.
In truth, most of our institutions have become useless and corrupt as those who run them become more concerned with performing for fellow elites than performing their actual jobs.
And because the elites have such contempt for normal people, they reward those who seem “transgressive” — regardless of whether they’re good at their jobs (they often aren’t), and regardless the damage done to public trust.
If you were an artist on the Left Bank in 1925 it may have been amusing, or at least attention-getting, to épater les bourgeois (annoy the ordinary folks).
In 2025, it’s just embarrassing.
And even the French avant-garde saved that stuff for the arts, not for public health.
Enough.
Nobody wants to have weird shocking people injecting things into their veins.
How about hiring some nice, boring, trustworthy, competent people for a change?
Or watch the CDC fade into irrelevance.
Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky said yesterday that Dr. Demetre C. Daskalakis should not have been in the CDC due to his radical gay lifestyle:
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5482672-rand-paul-daskalakis-lifestyle-criticism/
Paul: Gay CDC official’s ‘lifestyle’ disqualified him from government
By Joseph Choi - September 2, 2025Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said Tuesday that a gay leader at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) who resigned last week in protest of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had “no business being in government” due to the “lifestyle” he led.
Demetre Daskalakis, former director of the CDC’s Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, was among the four CDC leaders who resigned last week, saying in their resignations that the changes under Kennedy were preventing them from carrying out the agency’s public health mission.
“One of the guys that is the biggest proponent of doing all this is the guy who describes the risky behavior that he and his lifestyle involve. He describes that as that may be risky behavior to you, that just brings us joy,” Paul said when asked about the exodus in CDC leadership Tuesday evening, referring to Daskalakis.
Paul was discussing his opposition to infant vaccinations against hepatitis B when asked.
“A guy that is so far … out of the mainstream, I think most people in America would discount his opinion because of the things he said in the past. He does not represent the mainstream of anything in America,” Paul continued.
“He should have never had a position in government. And he brags about his lifestyle, you know, this whole idea of bondage and, you know, multiple partners and all that stuff. He brags about that stuff, but he’s got no business being in government. It’s good riddance.”
GOP Rep. Buddy Carter (Ga.) has also criticized Daskalakis for his personal life, calling him a “BDSM Satan worshipper” on CNN on Sunday.
Since resigning, Daskalakis has forcefully spoken out against Kennedy in the media, saying in an interview Sunday that he can “only see harm coming” from the secretary’s policies. He has specifically criticized actions by the Health and Human Services Department that limit access to mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.
In 2021, Daskalakis posed for the cover of Plus Magazine wearing a leather harness, an article of clothing popular among gay men and tied to the gay leather and BDSM communities. The cover and other posts Daskalakis made on social media have come under scrutiny in conservative media since his resignation.
Daskalakis came to wider public recognition when he led the CDC’s response to the 2022 mpox outbreak that primarily affected the social networks of men who have sex with men.
Other former CDC directors also came out against Kennedy in a New York Times op-ed published Monday
“What Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has done to the C.D.C. and to our nation’s public health system over the past several months — culminating in his decision to fire Dr. Susan Monarez as C.D.C. director days ago — is unlike anything we have ever seen at the agency, and unlike anything our country has ever experienced,” they wrote.
Roger Kimball's take on the RFK, Jr. black comedy roast at the Senate Finance Committee is worth a read:
https://amgreatness.com/2025/09/07/the-issue-is-never-the-issue-senate-hearing-turns-into-proxy-war/
The Issue Is Never the Issue: Senate Hearing Turns Into Proxy War
RFK Jr.’s Senate grilling wasn’t about COVID or the CDC—it was a proxy battle over power, Trump, and who controls the narrative.
By Roger Kimball - September 7, 2025The issue is never the issue.
The appearance of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of Health and Human Services, before the Pfizer Tribunal 🤣 at the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Thursday reminded me of the truth of that famous saying of Saul Alinsky.
The issue is never the issue. What is always the issue, according to that community organizer nonpareil, is power.
Ostensibly, Secretary Kennedy came to answer questions about COVID (remember that scam?) and the performance of people at—or, rather, recently at—the Centers for Disease Control. He recently fired the new, freshly confirmed director, Susan Monarez, for being “untrustworthy,” and some 1000 staffers walked out in solidarity or—what’s that other word beginning with an “s”?—Oh, right: in a snit.
One by one, the senators, mostly Democrats but also a few Republicans, screamed and gesticulated at Kennedy, accused him of being a “charlatan” and worse, and demanded that he resign or be fired.
One friendly questioner asked whether Kennedy thought that the response to COVID had been “politicized.” Indeed, it had, Kennedy said. Moreover, the government and the media lied to the public about many aspects of the disease, beginning with its origin. (No bats were involved in this entertainment.)
The public was also aggressively lied to about the danger of the virus—overwhelmingly, the only vulnerable parts of the population were the elderly, the obese, and the diabetic. We were lied to about the efficacy of “social distancing”—it was a made-up nostrum—and cloth masks. They are worse than useless. I still see damaged souls driving around in cars or walking outside by themselves wearing a mask. You might as well, as some wag proposed, wear a seat belt while walking around as a sort of safety blanket.
But the largest load of lies concerned the various COVID vaccines. Kennedy’s views about the efficacy and safety of vaccines are often caricatured. You may or may not always agree with him, but his views are nuanced, well-informed, and subtle. Several senators seemed surprised that Kennedy could agree with the proposition that President Trump deserves the Nobel Prize for overseeing Operation Warp Speed, which produced a spate of COVID vaccines in a matter of a few months, while also remaining highly critical of the safety and effectiveness of the vaccines.
But there is no contradiction. Remember, the public was assured by everyone from President Biden on down that the vaccine would prevent one from contracting COVID and also prevent one from transmitting the disease. “When people are vaccinated, they’re not going to get infected,” quoth Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the NIH. “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations,” agreed Joe Biden. “Vaccinated people do not carry the virus and don’t get sick,” said Rochelle Walensky, former Director of the CDC. Et ad nauseam cetera.
The public was also told, untruthfully, that the vaccine was more potent than the natural immunity one achieved from contracting the disease. Moreover, the public was told that everyone was at risk and needed the vaccine—and many doses—when only a tiny fraction of the population was at risk. Furthermore, the public was left in the dark about the serious health dangers the vaccine posed to young men and women.
The point to bear in mind here is that most of this misinformation was not the result of innocent mistakes. It was the fruit of deliberate lies.
So was what we might call the kinetic side of the government’s draconian response to COVID: closing schools, work, and social gathering places, shuttering the economy, and seriously handicapping large swathes of the population.
We await a full accounting of the social and economic damage done to Western societies that capitulated to the totalitarian zeal of the health police. Aspiring social engineers like Klaus Schwab, founder and former head of the World Economic Forum, were among those who welcomed the COVID epidemic as an opportunity to embark on a “Great Reset” in which all of society would be remade according to the socialist blueprint furnished by Davos.
But in an important sense, the criticism of Kennedy for his views on COVID, vaccines, and the staff at the CDC was merely a pretext. The issue is never the issue. Yes, Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has received $1,224,145 from Big Pharma, did her psychotic squaw routine against Kennedy. Bernie Sanders ($1,953,613) and Ron Wyden ($1,207,873) joined in the war dance, as did many others.
But the thing to appreciate about the melodrama is that it had very little to do with COVID or the CDC or even U.S. health policy writ large. The real protagonist was someone who wasn’t even present, viz. Donald Trump. The fire was directed at Kennedy, but the ultimate target was Trump. The strategy is to discredit and then destroy Kennedy, a potent outgrowth of the Trump administration. If the Dems can destroy Kennedy, he would represent the outer skin of the onion. They would then proceed against other Trump lieutenants.
Robert Kennedy wants to find out why Americans are fatter, sicker, and more plagued by chronic disease now than ever before. He wants to know why cases of autism have skyrocketed and why 8 out of 10 young adults are not fit enough to join the military. Is it because of what they eat, the medicines they are forced to take, or something else? The Democrats want to play what Bill Clinton (and later Hillary) called “the politics of personal destruction.”
The issue is never the issue, but determined truth-tellers like Robert Kennedy and his boss in the White House are a demonstration that “the issue” can be made to succumb to the awful clarity of common sense, bolstered by that other real issue, the executive power of the presidency.
Sponsors
Friends of MHF
Kirsten DeVries
Tom & Karen Nunheimer
Steve Ahonen
Ron & Faith Bosserman
Marlin & Kathy Klumpp
Sign Up for MHF Insights to keep up on the latest in Michigan Health Policy
