Warnings escalate about Trump and RFK Jr.’s threat to public health

President Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are “threatening the lives” of the American people, according to the head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control work on immunizations who resigned this week.

“I am unable to 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,” said Demetre Daskalakis, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.

He called Trump’s CDC “a political weapon, not a scientific institution.”

This echoes the warnings of academics and medical researchers around the world who are being hampered by conspiracy-fueled policies advanced by Kennedy, Trump’s secretary of Health and Human Services. Kennedy is a vaccine denier who is slashing medical research grants and redirecting the agency’s massive resources toward his own agenda. That affects not only the CDC but the National Institutes of Health and other grant-making entities.

For example, this week the Trump CDC gave approval to the latest updated COVID-19 vaccine booster but placed limitations on access to the vaccine.

Emily Smith, a professor and researcher at Duke University, blogs as Your Friendly Neighborhood Epidemiologist. She recently announced that her own research on cancer in children has been defunded and she launched her own fundraising effort to continue it.

“My team is about 80% funded through NIH grants (including me), and the first few funding freezes and executive orders spared my team,” she wrote May 13. “But that all changed this week. This week, NIH halted funding of all international activities that were done in partnership with a US-based institution (like Duke). So, this means that I will no longer be able to pay my team, hire my team or keep my team employed through NIH funding once my current funding runs out — simply because of where they live and where the work is happening.

“But the work is happening there because that’s where the need is the most for these kids with cancer. Without that work (and lots of other NIH-funded work in these countries), children will die. I’m not sure how to say that any softer because that’s just the reality. 90% of these kids with cancer in low-income countries will die without treatment. My team is there to help them live.”

Smith, a Baptist layperson, explains her work seeks to level the disparity between outcomes for children with cancer in the U.S. and in other countries.

“In the U.S., 90% of children with cancer will live because of available treatment and access to care,” she said. “In low-income countries, only 10% will live, with 90% dying because of the lack of treatment and access. This 90-10 children-cancer-disparity is one of the starkest in global health.”

“Often times, these families have to then make a decision between cancer care for one child and feeding the rest. An impossible decision and one that no family should have to make,” she said. “In my work, I want to make that decision obsolete.”

Much of Trump’s budget-slashing has been directed at international projects, which he and his MAGA base consider a poor use of resources due to their “America first” agenda.

This could drag us back to “a pre-vaccine era where only the strong will survive.”

Upon departing the CDC, Daskalakis accused Trump and Kennedy of “radical non-transparency and unskilled manipulation of data to achieve a political end,” warning this could drag us back to “a pre-vaccine era where only the strong will survive.”

“I am not sure who the secretary is listening to, but it is quite certainly not to us at the CDC. Unvetted and conflicted outside organizations seem to be the sources HHS use over the gold standard science of CDC and other reputable sources.”

The result will not just be deaths of children and adults overseas but also in the United States, he warned. Their “desire to please a political base will result in death and disability of vulnerable children and adults. Their base should be the people they serve, NOT a political voting bloc.”

Daskalakis’s resignation follows Trump’s ouster of CDC Director Susan Monarez, who had only been in the job for weeks. She was fired after refusing to back Kennedy’s anti-science policies.

Daskalakis is one of four agency leaders who resigned after Monarez was fired.

Kevin Heifner, a Baptist layman and nephrologist in Little Rock, Ark., posted his own warning on Facebook Aug. 27.

“We are witnessing in real time a dismantling of science and medicine unprecedented in our history,” he said. “I’m referring to policy and funding attacks on premier institutions which promote and protect the health of every American. Especially the young, elderly and otherwise vulnerable. The CDC, NIH, National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, NCI, and other organizations. The agencies tasked to do the highest level scientific research, develop medicines and vaccines, and promote public health strategies to protect all.

“As a physician, I know people who work at these places. They are the best and brightest we have. Until recently, everyone supported and benefited from their work over the past half century. Times have changed.

“Bacteria and viruses are the most nondiscriminatory entities on earth. Cancer also. They do not care about gender, ethnicity, political affiliation, where or if you worship, what you believe, or if you’re a butcher, baker, candlestick-maker. They simply infect and kill with no regard.

“And now we have a number of top scientists and heads of these agencies placed in the untenable position of making policy decisions based not on science but on political whim and pressure.”

He concluded: “I don’t know of any reputable physician regardless of partisanship who supports the policies being promoted by our current Department of Health and Human Services as led by Robert Kennedy. Zero scientific training. Unintelligent, unserious, dangerous. His policies left unchallenged will harm your friends and family.

“There’s a lot of political disagreement in our nation. This is the most nonpartisan issue imaginable. Funding cuts, anti-science policy and the wanton dismissal of premier scientists and public health experts places all in danger equally.”