New investigation reveals CDC inflated Covid threat level in kids as resignations rock the agency
After withholding key safety data on RSV antibodies, the nation’s top health agency is once again under fire — this time for presenting Covid data in ways that inflate the risk for children.
The CDC has been thrown into turmoil after Director Susan Monarez was ousted and several senior officials resigned in quick succession.
One of them, Dr Demetre Daskalakis, head of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, announced his resignation effective August 28, 2025.
In an explosive letter of resignation on X, he declared “enough is enough,” accusing the new HHS leadership of “unskilled manipulation of data to achieve a political end rather than the good of the American people.”
Daskalakis went further, claiming that the newly restructured Advisory Committee on Immunisation Practices (ACIP) was being placed under the control of people “of dubious intent and more dubious scientific rigor” whose “desire to please a political base will result in death and disability of vulnerable children and adults.”
But the hypocrisy is striking.
Daskalakis was one of the very officials responsible for liaising with ACIP while his own agency was withholding critical safety data on seizures in babies given Sanofi’s RSV monoclonal antibody, clesrovimab.
Following that investigation, rumblings began within the CDC itself, as sources close to the situation said that many ACIP members were “troubled” by my revelations.
ACIP member Dr Robert Malone broke ranks, warning that advisers had been given too little time to interrogate the evidence and had simply trusted the CDC’s word.
“That trust in the data presented now appears to have been ill-advised,” Malone stated. “Going forward … I will no longer be able to trust that what is presented in CDC summaries to the ACIP is transparent, accurate, and unbiased.”
That was the first crack in the façade. Now a new analysis threatens to blow it wide open. It reveals that the CDC also misrepresented Covid-19 risks when briefing ACIP by presenting numbers in a way that inflated the threat level to children.
Dr Joshua Guetzkow, Senior Lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has also reviewed the data and says he has “serious reservations” about the transparency of the CDC’s presentations.
Those concerns extend to the CDC once again politicising the science—shaping its briefings to push ACIP toward recommending broader use of the updated Covid-19 vaccines ahead of the upcoming September vote.