The CDC Lost a Queer Icon: Why Dr. Demetre Daskalakis Left a Broken System

After years of fighting for queer health from inside the system, Daskalakis says he had to walk away — and speak out — when politics started rewriting science

Published: October 21, 2025 | Last Updated: October 28, 2025

In the world of queer health advocacy, few figures are as instantly recognizable — or as unapologetically committed — as Dr. Demetre Daskalakis. Whether he’s shaping public health policy, calling out institutional failures or guiding the LGBTQ+ community through the mpox outbreak, Daskalakis leads with both expertise and authenticity. He doesn’t just understand that who you are is inseparable from how you serve — he’s been living it.

“I am what I am and you get what you get,” he says with a smirk. “And I happen to be a really good infectious disease doctor and a really good public health person. If you don’t like that I am married to a man and know how to pull a look, then too bad.”

That kind of bold, take-it-or-leave-it honesty has made the infectious disease physician and gay health activist a hero to many in both LGBTQ+ and medical communities — and why his very public resignation from the CDC earlier this year sent shockwaves. Following President Trump’s firing of CDC Director Susan Monarez, Daskalakis, who served as director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention for two years, was one of three top agency leaders who resigned in August, alongside Debra Houry, deputy director and chief medical officer, and Daniel Jernigan, director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases.

“Having worked in local and national public health for years, I have never experienced such radical non-transparency, nor have I seen such unskilled manipulation of data to achieve a political end rather than the good of the American people,” Daskalakis wrote in his resignation letter.

Daskalakis didn’t leave quietly. His letter was a mic drop in a career full of them — a direct challenge to what he calls ideological interference and attacks on science from outside the institution.

“I had two versions of the letter,” he says. “I had the very quick, ‘Thanks, this is awful, I resign’ version. And I had the ‘Let me tell you why’ version.”

He sent the latter. The final letter, which included the phrase “enough is enough,” quickly went viral. The reaction, Daskalakis says, has been overwhelming — in both uplifting and terrifying ways.

“I had to file a police report because of threats, and I had to meet with Homeland Security,” he says. “There’s definitely folks who want to see this ‘Make America Healthier Again’ sort of vision come to fruition, even though it’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

Still, for all the conservative backlash, there’s been an equal — and far more powerful — wave of gratitude.

“People [whose opinions] I care about right now are actually being very supportive,” he says. “The people who don’t want to have anything to do with anything that I want to do with, they’re already not very supportive, so I’m not surprised that I have attacks from folks who have that baseline and axe to grind because of who I am and what I’ve done.”

‘No’ as a public health strategy

One of the most profound ideas Daskalakis brings up is the concept of saying “no” — not as retreat, but as rebellion.

“The most American thing to do is to quit — and make it big — and say, ‘I dissent,’” he says. “Also, I’m Greek. There was a little group of Greek guys and they just said, ‘Οχι,’ which is the word for no. And that was the way they did it.”

His “no” echoed that same legacy — a refusal to stay complicit.

“I gotta be punk rock about this one,” he adds. “If I’m leaving, I’m leaving and telling truth to power.”

Daskalakis is quick to make one thing clear: The problem isn’t the scientists at the CDC. It’s the political forces constraining them. “The scientists are being held hostage there,” he says. “They’re not able to do their work in a fully realized way, because the ideology is holding them captive.”

Recently, six former U.S. surgeons general appointed by every Republican and Democratic president since George H.W. Bush wrote an op-ed that was published in the Washington Post. Its title says it outright: “It’s our duty to warn the nation about RFK Jr.”

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“The actions of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are endangering the health of the nation. Never before have we issued a joint public warning like this,” they wrote.

During his time at the CDC, Daskalakis distributed yellow enamel ribbons to the leadership team — a gesture of solidarity and a recognition of how his medical colleagues were, in his view, hostages within their own institution. He explains that political leadership during the Trump administration — particularly those appointed to health agencies — “are really trying to make every day that they go to work traumatic and everything that they do in science difficult,” he says. “People need to know that.”

Behind the scenes, he says he was seeing “crazy stuff” with the flu vaccine and thimerosal, a key ingredient that health organizations said is safe. Ultimately, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), under the supervision of RFK Jr., removed the preservative from the vaccine.

“What we've seen these last couple of days, and some of the actions over the last several weeks, is a deliberate effort to distract from the facts and instill fear about vaccines,” said Sean T. O’Leary, chair of the AAP Committee on Infectious Diseases (COID). “The strategy relies on cherry-picked data and junk science to confuse the public and erode trust in immunizations.” Daskalakis emphasized those thoughts, adding that HHS forced the change “just because they wanted to do it, and it was an axe they were grinding for 20 years.”

And then came that very public Sept. 22 press conference — Trump, on camera, pushing a false link between Tylenol use and autism. To Daskalakis, it was surreal, but also predictable.

“I got asked by media, like, what do you think about this Tylenol thing?” he recalls, laughing. “And I was like, please see my letter — I told you so a couple of weeks ago.”

Though the Tylenol claim was well outside his direct purview, the way it unfolded was eerily familiar: “You have people who’ve had an axe to grind for 25 to 30 years,” he says, “and now they’re using that ideology to change health policy.”

To Daskalakis, this was a moment when science wasn’t just being ignored — it was being rewritten. “The FDA letter that went out to providers, in effect, was a nothingburger. It said nothing,” he adds. “It was like, ‘Use Tylenol judiciously.’ And you're like, ‘You mean like people have been for the last 40 years?’”

“When you see Trump talking about Tylenol, and then that preview of vaccine stuff, where he went over all the completely incorrect stuff around vaccines — that’s how he’s being briefed by RFK Jr.,” he says. “It’s Orwellian. It’s right out of ‘1984.’”

Cherry-picked data. Soundbites posing as policy. A refusal to share internal data even with top CDC officials. “I asked for it,” he says. “I was like, ‘You’re going to change COVID vaccine recommendations — where are the data?’ And they said, ‘We’re not going to give it to you.’”

That moment, he says, affirmed his decision to leave. The Tylenol press conference — where Trump mispronounced acetaminophen while pushing a scientifically debunked autism link — only reinforced it.

“Ta-da!” he says. “I mean, if anyone read my letter and then saw that press conference, they'd go, ‘Yeah. That’s what he meant.’”

Leaving to lead

Daskalakis isn’t done leading — he’s simply shifting where and how he does it. His departure from the CDC wasn’t a flippant decision; it was about preserving integrity in a system that, to him, no longer felt salvageable from the inside. It followed months of watching science lose ground in political fights and seeing firsthand how that loss affects real people’s health.

“One of the things that’s great about being an infectious disease doctor and a public health person is that you can take a stand,” he says. “There’s this line of humans who are interested in doing this work that is starting to diminish. Why would I go into public health or infectious diseases when it’s ignored at best, vilified at worst?”

His resignation was as much a protest against systemic dysfunction as it was a call to action for the next generation. “That’s the legacy,” he says. His commitment to showing up — not just in policy discussions, but in clinics, queer spaces and even for this interview — is central to who he is.

“So much of what led me to public health had to do with seeing what happened when a system didn’t support the health of people and how their health was compromised,” he says. “Being a part of communities that have had their health compromised, it was a pretty important mission for me to make sure that I brought my whole authentic self to the table.”

His path toward medicine and public health began in college, driven by concern for how HIV was impacting gay and queer men, including friends who died of AIDS. In 1991, while living in New York, then a major epicenter of the epidemic, he experienced the crisis up close. “You definitely saw some death and destruction,” he says. Later, as an undergrad at Columbia University, he helped create a student-made AIDS memorial quilt.

“I wanted to do medicine, but didn't know what that meant until I was in college and started to do work in the HIV space,” he says. He recalls people coming in “crying and mourning” those they had lost. When the memorial quilt was finally displayed, he remembers watching individuals who seemed barely strong enough to stand making the effort to see it. While at Columbia, he had a moment of clarity: “I want to make sure that whatever I do is in medicine. I don't want people to get infectious diseases or suffer from them. And at that point, it was all about HIV, but then my career has gone all sorts of places, where I've been able to have impacted HIV, but also a couple of other really important infectious diseases.”

I have a lot of faith that we’re only in a temporary state. And I believe that spark is there — that spark that’s going to create the brightest light and get rid of the dark. But we’re not there yet.
— Dr. Demetre Daskalakis

In 2022, Daskalakis was widely praised by the LGBTQ+ community for his leadership as White House National Monkeypox Response Deputy Coordinator. Before that, in 2020, he joined the CDC’s Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Now, he’s deeply aware of how his visibility in public health affects queer and trans medical students and early-career professionals — many of whom have long felt out of place in the system. “I don’t know any other way but to be myself,” he says. “And I don’t really apologize for it.”

And people notice. “When I meet a med student and they’re like, ‘I’ve been following your career,’ I’m like, ‘Really?’” he says, laughing. “It doesn’t really dawn on me that the things I’ve had the privilege of doing, both outside and inside government, have been impactful to people.”

Writing the next chapter

As for what’s next? Even Daskalakis is not entirely sure.

“I don’t think that my life has stabilized enough yet for me to be able to answer that question,” he says. “Because I don’t have a job yet.”

He’s started to write — documenting the behind-the-scenes of his time in public health, from HIV and mpox to the White House and the CDC. He says the memoir might be “depressing in the middle, but it gets good at the end.” And for someone who’s lived through the darkest moments of the AIDS crisis and helped lead the charge against mpox, he knows how essential the ending is.

“The light is always brightest in the darkest places, right?” he says.

What gives him hope, even now, is the people — the community stepping up where institutions are falling short. “When you lose science, and there’s no political will, the only thing left is community,” he says. “And we’ve been here before.”

He’s witnessed some alliances taking shape that give him hope: LGBTQ+ advocates, immigrant rights groups, mainstream medical associations — even insurance companies — uniting to push back against ideology-driven science policy.

“I have a lot of faith that we’re only in a temporary state,” he says. “And I believe that spark is there — that spark that’s going to create the brightest light and get rid of the dark. But we’re not there yet.”

Now, in this in-between moment — no longer inside the institution, not yet fully outside it — Daskalakis is still doing the work. And he’s even finding moments of humor in it all: “I’m the busiest unemployed person that you’ll meet,” he says.