‘HIV Is Too Woke’: Why This Gay Doctor Resigned From Trump’s CDC [WATCH]

Dr. Demetre Daskalakis made headlines last year when he resigned from the CDC in protest of Trump’s and RFK Jr.’s scientifically questionable views. Here, he reveals what working there was like.

Design by Soph Holland. Photos by Lauren Bishop, the White House and Daniel Torok.

This story was produced with the support of MISTR, a telehealth platform offering free online access to PrEP, DoxyPEP, STI testing, Hepatitis C testing and treatment and long-term HIV care across the U.S. MISTR did not have any editorial input into the content of this story.

Dr. Demetre Daskalakis is one of the foremost LGBTQ health professionals in the U.S. In November 2020, the waning months of Trump’s first term, he was appointed director of the Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Through part of his tenure with the Biden administration, he also served as the deputy response coordinator for mpox at the White House as well as the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.

While he continued a lot of this work after Biden left office, he didn’t last long under Trump 2.0. In August 2025, Daskalakis resigned from the CDC over the direction that health policy had taken under Trump and Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

In his resignation letter, which garnered widespread attention, he said he was “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.” He cited changes to the CDC’s immunization schedule, a lack of scientific communication from HHS leadership and the growing influence of anti-vaccine sentiments in the department.

A year after his resignation, we wanted to hear from Daskalakis, who is now serving as chief medical officer of the Callen-Lorde Community Health Center, an LGBTQ health clinic in New York City. In this episode of “UNCLOSETED with Spencer Macnaughton,” Daskalakis speaks about his time working for the Trump administration, the erosion of scientific rigor under RFK Jr. and the troubling future for HIV and LGBTQ healthcare in the U.S.

Watch the full interview above or read the transcript here:

Spencer Macnaughton: Hi everyone, welcome back to UNCLOSETED with me, Spencer Macnaughton. Today, I’m speaking with Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, the chief medical officer at Callen-Lorde and the former director of the Division of HIV and AIDS at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Dr. Daskalakis worked for the CDC under President Biden and under President Trump during his second term, but he resigned in August 2025, alleging that the center became a place that generated policies that were not reflective of scientific reality. Demetre, thanks so much for speaking with me and Uncloseted Media today.

Demetre Daskalakis: Thanks Spencer, great to be here.

SM: I wanna get right into it because you interestingly worked at the CDC under Biden and under Trump. I wanna know the difference, your day-to-day job and kind of the environment and the climate at the CDC. What did you do when Biden was president and how did that change when Trump took office?

DD: There was a palpable change in what it was like to be at the CDC. There were things about the Biden administration that you could always criticize. But the one thing that you couldn’t criticize was that in that administration, I would say that 80% of my day was actually doing science and public health. When the administration changed, the effect was that, as a career scientist at CDC, it felt as if we were on a hijacked plane. So we were doing the science, we were doing the epidemiology, we were preparing all the briefings to be able to communicate to the new administration’s political appointees. And it was crickets. We were put deeper into this expert echo chamber where we were doing the data and doing the work. And frankly, no one was listening. Decisions were being made like a hijacker in a cockpit without any sort of feedback from anyone on the airplane. So maybe you think that you’re going to Alaska, but the hijackers are taking you wherever they wanna take you and you’re just on that plane. So it felt a lot different.

SM: Well and can you give me a specific example of something like that?

DD: Sure, I think, probably, the most exemplary of how odd it was to be there was the day that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced a change in the adolescent vaccine schedule for COVID-19 as well as the schedule for vaccines for pregnant people for COVID-19. I was sitting in a meeting with CDC leadership and I had people texting me saying, “Hey, Demetre, did you all change the COVID vaccine schedule?” and I was in charge of COVID. And I said, “No, I haven’t changed a thing. No one’s changed anything.” And then the next thing was a video that was posted on X that was Secretary Kennedy with Dr. Makary and Dr. Bhattacharya standing doing a two-minute long video announcing that they changed the schedule for COVID-19 vaccine unbeknownst to any scientist at CDC. And Spencer, just to sort of add another dimension to that, when we reached back over to HHS to say, “Hey, we just saw this video, what is going on?” Their response was, “You need to change the vaccine schedule based on the video,” and I’ve been doing government for a while and I was like, “I can’t change anything without paper. I need to see what you want, not just sort of watch a 30-second long video and try to extrapolate from your words.” Sure enough, they sent us like three sheets of paper that were completely different than what they said on the video. And so then the chaos continued to ensue to figure out what they actually wanted. And so they changed the vaccine schedule for the country without actually having any communication with the scientists that were responsible for COVID-19 surveillance, for vaccine surveillance and for vaccine policy. We had no idea it was coming. We learned about it on X. When we asked, we said, “You know what? OK, thanks, we got it. Can you send us the justification, the analysis that you did to prove that this is the thing to do?” And they just said no.

SM: They just said no?

DD: We’ve never seen it. CDC to this day—no one at CDC has in fact ever seen the justification in the memo that generated a decision to change the national COVID-19 vaccine schedule. And so that’s what it felt like being at CDC. Like you were doing the work and no one cared.

SM: And are there theories as to where this new mandate came from? Where did RFK Jr. decide to do this? Is this just his personal beliefs? Who is he listening to, do you guys think?

DD: Yeah, I mean, Children’s Health Defense is who he listens to. They’re the Rolls-Royce of anti-vaccine organizations. It was created by RFK Jr. It’s his brain child. And for a while, he was the whatever the head leader is. And so routinely, when we were curious what our day was going to be like in terms of requests from the secretary’s office, we would go on the X account at Children’s Health Defense and see what they were chattering about. And then sure enough, we would often get the exact request that we would expect based on what we were seeing there. So it’s my opinion, though I can’t prove it, that the briefings that he was getting and the guidance that he was getting was coming from these external anti-vaccine operatives. Because we certainly never briefed him, in my time there, which was from January until August when I quit. The man has never been briefed by a scientist in my center about measles, COVID, childhood vaccination, you name it. Yet he felt very confident going on the media making very definitive declarative sentences and statements around this that were not based on any reference to the experts that actually were doing the science.

SM: And I think like for the people watching, because there’s so much misinformation, especially health misinformation out there right now and some people might be thinking, “Well, why am I supposed to trust Demetre and the folks at the CDC over RFK Jr.?” So explain, in layman’s terms, why those two worlds are very different and why there is actual processes to come up with these protocols in typical environments like the CDC would have been pre-Trump 2.0.

DD: Sure. RFK Jr. is an anti-vaccine operative, and he has been so for decades. And so you know the information that he has been sharing around vaccines has frankly been right out of the sort of the anti-vaccine playbook, which frankly, he wrote. He’s written several books that we reviewed actually, before he started, so we could figure out how to best work with him, that really focus on some pretty important mis- and disinformation. I think that there’s a series of things that he said about many vaccines. Measles vaccines containing fetal parts; that’s untrue. Measles vaccine being more deadly than the measles infection; again unsubstantiated, not true. So your secretary of health is someone who has been trying to dismantle the vaccine infrastructure now for decades. And now he has the keys to the kingdom where he’s able to do it.

SM: And you wrote in your resignation letter that you are, quote, “unable to serve in an environment that treats CDC as a tool to generate policies and materials that do not reflect scientific reality and that are designed to hurt rather than improve the public’s health.” Super bold statement and obviously there’s a lot to unpack there. We just spoke a little bit about vaccines, but as it relates to health issues that disproportionately affect LGBTQ people, like HIV and AIDS, gender-affirming care, so many other things we could talk about. When you were in CDC under Trump, what was that experience like? Any stories to share?

DD: You know, I think from the HIV perspective, you know, it is very clear that, in the second Trump administration, that they have a pretty extreme disdain for anyone who is not a cisgender white male. And so that I think is very clear across the board. And so I think what we were seeing at CDC was a devaluing of the work that is pivotal in preventing HIV. So let’s go back in a time machine. Trump won, they actually launched the “Ending the HIV Epidemic Program,” which was a very aggressive program that was designed to drive down the HIV epidemic by 2030 so that we could, in effect, end the HIV epidemic by having fewer new infections in the country meaning that we’re going to at some point extinguish rather than continue.

SM: And you like that, I’m guessing.

DD: Oh, yeah, it’s a great idea. Like, you have the technology, you just have to have the political will to be able to get HIV under better control. And so January 20th, 2025, rolls around and the political will gets fully pulled out from under us. And so, when the president’s budget comes out, they pretty much zero out HIV prevention. And then Congress said, you can’t zero out HIV prevention. So they took it back. The next budget that’s been released for 2027, they almost zeroed it out again. And so it’s like, you know, beyond the ideology, which you can also talk about, the president’s budget is a moral document that tells you what the president and the executive branch values. Read between the lines. They do not value this. And like, you know, from the perspective of LGBTQ folks, there’s a lot of threats to our health. But HIV is one that is clear and present and that we have the technology to stop. I’ll also give one more story, which is after my time. So when Dr. Jay Bhattacharya was elevated to the position of the acting CDC director, he stood in front of the CDC staff and he said that one of the highest priorities that he had was ending the HIV epidemic because of the availability of long acting injectable drugs that could either treat or prevent HIV. Moments later, the president released their president’s budget for 2027, slashing the entire budget for CDC’s HIV program. You can’t end HIV if you don’t have a program to give out the drug.

SM: Right, and what do you think is behind that, slashing all of it? Is it just homophobes in Trump’s ear? Do you have any theories or any evidence that suggests why they did this?

DD: It is literally this narrative that HIV is just “too woke.” My favorite use of the word.

SM: That’s literally what you think it is.

DD: I don’t think it is; that’s what it is, that is literally the words that are spoken around the HIV mission.

SM: Have you heard that though? Tell me who said it and where’d you hear it?

DD: These are words that have come out of leadership from HHS. Right? I mean, that’s the bottom line. It’s too woke, too much LGBT, too much transgender, it’s just too woke. And so it doesn’t comport to the ideological mission of the second Trump administration, given that they need to sort of speak to a base that is energized by anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, right? So there are going to be people within the administration who know that HIV is a good thing to take care of. But they need to make it look like they’re not supporting these populations that they have created so much stigma and disdain among some people in the U.S.

SM: Publicly, I haven’t heard anyone say HIV is too woke. Is there somebody—are these in private meetings? Like, who did you hear say it if you’re comfortable sharing?

DD: The HIV budget was first cut by DOGE. They laid off everybody. Why? Because the way that DOGE works was using AI, identifying the words they don’t like, all the woke words. And guess where all the woke words were?

SM: Right.

DD: In HIV. So like, it’s not subtle. There’s no interest in supporting those populations. And you know, it is a rare twist of policy to see a government that decides that they’re going to completely erase a population, like transgender people, by saying that we’re going to no longer gather data about them. So forget about the funding out the door to make sure that transgender folks get the services that they need. But like CDC can—and actually almost all of the government agencies have had to remove the things that they would use to be able to assess the burden of diseases in transgender people. Even in my vaccine universe where I was most recently, we have a national immunization survey that I published on during COVID, where we reviewed how LGBTQ communities were accessing the COVID vaccine. And I was able to slice the data into transgender, cisgender, gay, lesbian, bisexual. They removed those questions by the order of the president. So now no one knows. So they’re erasing the data related to our community.

SM: And we did an investigation last June about the staggering scale of the administration’s HIV cuts, which amounted to over $1 billion from the National Institutes of Health and more from other agencies at the time. How has the landscape changed since then? Has it gotten worse? Have the cuts continued? And also, what are the actual tangible effects of these that we’re already seeing on the ground?

DD: So there’s a couple of things. So the new president’s budget takes the CDC HIV domestic endeavor from about a billion dollar endeavor to a $220 million endeavor. That is a substantial cut. Eighty percent of the money that I am talking about goes out the door straight to jurisdictions to be able to actually do the HIV programming at the front line. That is also the money that the jurisdictions use to do surveillance, to be able to measure how we’re doing with HIV. So the landscape from the perspective of the president’s budget is more destruction. Ultimately, my hope is that, just like last year, Congress will say, well, that’s foolish and say, no, you can’t do that, which is what our budget process is in the United States. But there’s more threats that we need to worry about. Just yesterday, comments closed on a new rule from the OMB, Office of Management and Budget. And that rule allows political [appointees] to decide what money goes out the door regardless of what Congress thinks. So the reality is that even if Congress says, “No, no, you can’t cut this funding, we’re not going to listen to the president’s budget,” the executive branch and the political appointees may be able to stop the money from going out the door anyway. That may mean that Congress will put money in HIV, the money won’t be spent because the politicals won’t let it go out. And that looks to Congress like underspending. And what does Congress do when they see underspending in subsequent budget years? They cut the money.

SM: Wow.

DD: And so there is a pretty nefarious effort to dismantle the HIV endeavor in the United States.

SM: Yeah, and we’ve done a lot of stories on how queer people of color and the Bible Belt need PrEP access the most and have the biggest difficulty in accessing it. There’s so many stories that the HIV and AIDS crisis is not over at all, right? Earlier this year, you said that, quote, “if we don’t change the present in terms of how we’re fighting HIV and AIDs, I think we’re going to be put into a time machine back to the early 1990s.”

DD: Totally.

SM: I mean, that’s a really bold statement. Tell me what you mean by that.

DD: Yeah, so a couple of things. It’s not just about HIV funding, like a very large number, and I can’t remember the percentage, but it’s a large number of people living with HIV are insured by Medicaid.

SM: Right.

DD: There is a massive cut that is going to happen that will affect people living with HIV. There are new work requirements that are going to make it difficult for some people with HIV to maintain their Medicaid. There are new documentation requirements with recertifying your Medicaid every six months, which will mean some of those people will either lose and come back to insurance, really creating a lot of havoc and instability.

SM: And just so I can understand, if people go off Medicaid, that might mean they’re not getting the medication they need to stay undetectable, which could then create more spread of the virus. Is that a major concern?

DD: So that’s exactly right. So if you’re not on insurance that’s stable and then, all of a sudden, you have like one month or two months off of your medicines, that means that your viral load can become detectable again. It’s more likely to transmit and your immune system is going to suffer and going on and off meds, on and off, on and off, could even potentially lead to resistance in the long term, which means that people may lose some of their easier treatment options. So the impact on Medicaid is going to hit HIV, we have flat funded Ryan White that has gotten within the cost of medicines, the cost of care, by flat funding something for many years, you’re in effect cutting it because of inflation. And so lots of places have had to create a lot of limits on Ryan White, which is the safety net funding that supports uninsured people living with HIV. And if that’s not there, then there’s people that are not going to be able to access meds. And then, you cut all the prevention funding, which also supports people living with HIV but is also cutting off half of the cycle of care that we have and saying, “Well if you’re a Black gay man or trans woman in the south, we’re going to cut the funding to the organizations that support you to be able to access pre-exposure prophylaxis.”

SM: Wow. And when you say 1990s, make that tangible for us. What do you foresee? If nothing changes, what do you actually see happening to the spread of this virus?

DD: So the trends that we have seen in people, fewer people getting HIV, will reverse. We will have more people getting the virus. We’ll have fewer people who are accessing pre-exposure prophylaxis or PrEP, which means that they will be more at risk for infection. We’ll have fewer people getting treatment, which means that you’ll also see cases of way more advanced disease. Oh, and they also transmit the virus. Lastly, when you create so much stigma, like this administration is doing toward our community, are you going to go to the government to get your HIV care and services or anyone who’s funded by the government when they’re also trying to erase you and potentially worse? So we’re going into a time machine backwards, both in stigma as well as in access. And that is actually an unconscionable place to be in 2026.

SM: Anything else you heard while you were at the CDC or through the people working there that would shed more light onto their perspective about HIV and AIDS?

DD: Yeah, I feel like there are just so much words that don’t match actions. Like I said, the notion that the person who was acting as CDC director said one of his top priorities is ending the HIV epidemic. And then every budget for HIV gets slashed, whether it’s prevention treatment or research, like it doesn’t really jive, right?

SM: Hypocrisy.

DD: It is Orwellian doublespeak. It is beyond hypocrisy. It is purposeful propaganda and it’s dangerous. The peace created in the HIV space is a fragile one. There’s been decades of stigma and decades of populations that have felt ignored. Let me tell you, I’m living in New York now and, like, I have a perspective because I was in the deep south in Atlanta. Let me tell you, stigma is the thing that kills people, along with access problems. Literally, the administration is creating active stigma and access problems, so we’re going to have a really tough road unless this course is reversed.

SM: And we couldn’t find any data since Trump was reelected that really could tell the story about what’s happening to HIV and AIDS rates. I believe it’s going up in New York, but correct me if I’m wrong. Do we know anything nationally about what is happening right now?

DD: Yeah. There are some data that were released that really reflects, I think, up to 2024. And so, I think unfortunately, the ramifications of what is happening are not going to be ones that we’re going to detect in very easy real time because disease surveillance lags behind, especially in HIV. It could very well be that we are not gonna see a lot of impact until two, three years after all of the Medicaid slashes are done, after whatever happens to CDC’s HIV prevention division. And by then, we may be in a different administration. But definitely, for those of us who’ve done the work for decades, everything is moving in a direction that would imply that we are about to see some pretty bad stuff happen.

SM: Wow. Pivoting to another bright topic, we spoke earlier about the erasure of LGBTQ data inside the CDC and the public, us, we’ve seen headlines like, “The CDC Has Removed Databases From Their Website on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity.” What else did you see? But also, some people might think, “Eh, it’s data, why do we need it, what does it matter?” Why is this important? And what did you see?

DD: On gender identity, there are whole webpages that have been removed or edited that no longer reflect the science or the reality of the diseases that they’re supposed to communicate about. Like you can’t really [talk about] HIV and STIs, without talking about gender identity. It’s not really easy to do some of the maternal fetal health even, without talking about gender. There is an ideology driven change in what’s coming out of CDC, which unfortunately means that there’s organizations that are respected that have overtly said that you can’t trust that website anymore. What’s next? Is the thing that you have to worry about. Cause right now the target seems to be, at least in the LGBTQ side of the world, transgender folks. I mean, the HIV surveillance data that was released recently doesn’t talk at all about gender identity and transgender folks are overrepresented in the HIV epidemic. And so now a transgender woman isn’t visible in the data.

SM: And why does that matter? Why is that a bad thing?

DD: It’s like you’re flying blind if you lose parts of the data. It’s kind of like trying to drive a car and only being able to see what gear you’re in without seeing the speedometer. You don’t have the full data, so you’re like, “I think I’m going around 25 miles per hour, but I don’t know. Am I going faster? Am I going slower? I don’t know.”

SM: I bet, too, when you need funding for things that are focused on disproportionate minorities who are affected by certain diseases, a lot of the time you’ll leverage that data to get the funding and now you can’t do that.

DD: Not even leverage. That’s how you generate—like, you have to prove that you need it. And so if I can’t prove that I need it, in effect, what you’re doing is saying, “I no longer value this community,” right? I’m not going to invest in you because I don’t think that your life is worth it. In simple terms, that’s what that means.

SM: Should Americans trust the CDC right now?

DD: It is such a complex question. CDC scientists who are working on the inside are great. But you know, my analogy at the beginning of our talk, I think it holds true. They’re on a hijacked plane. And some of the decisions that are being made at CDC and some of the ways that information are being communicated is highly suspect. There was a study of the vaccine effectiveness of COVID vaccine that the acting CDC director just said, “Yeah, we’re not going to publish it” because he criticized the science. Subsequently, our respected medical journal reviewed that same article and published it because the science was very high quality.

SM: Well, I mean, it sounds like a hard no for trusting the CDC.

DD: Yeah. I have so many mixed feelings on this.

SM: What’s holding you back?

DD: When you cannot trust the federal government’s communication, you need to look somewhere. So I tend to say that in this current era, that I would more trust your medical provider and your local health department, local state, city health department more than I would trust what’s coming out from CDC because all of those people have now been given another job on top of their regular job, and that other job is that they have to be the sort of air traffic controller to be able to communicate well to people what’s actually true versus what is coming out of CDC that’s ideology. So they’re looking at the website themselves, they’re looking at the data and very often are putting out their own recommendations and analysis because they have to sort of quarterback like the craziness at CDC.

SM: Wow. You are obviously the chief medical officer at Callen-Lorde, and as we know, the Trump administration has been slamming Callen-Lorde and other New York City hospitals for continuing to provide gender-affirming care to minors, to trans minors. What’s it been like weathering that storm, especially in New York City?

DD: This part feels a lot like what it felt like to be at CDC. Instead of doing the good work, we have to manage these principles, these folks at HHS, these folks in the administration that really don’t have business in interfering in the care that is provided to patients and is agreed upon by the patient and their parents. We shout out the Mamdani administration and they’re amazing. But we also need to shout out like the state attorney general’s office, who has been so pivotal in making sure that these life affirming services are maintained, and that we are weathering the storm that continues to be thrown at us. So I think it’s that, but then also, our patients are suffering, right? It is hard to be a trans person anywhere in the United States right now. Because again, it’s like the government is saying they don’t value your care and don’t value your life. And so it’s a really hard time trying to pursue this care. But at the end of the day, so much energy is being taken away from taking care of patients and dealing with policy decisions and lawyers and all of this other stuff that just gets in the way of the care.

SM: I think a lot about the kind of silent effects of all of this, of coming after LGBTQ healthcare at large. I mean, you’ve been in this space for decades, right? There’s gotta be more insidious spin-off effects that happen in terms of the public’s understanding of LGBTQ health. What are your thoughts there? What do you think is happening from all of this? I know you mentioned stigma before, but what else? What are the things we might not be seeing in the headlines?

DD: Our population is being sort of villainized or demonized. So I feel like that’s sort of what you’re seeing. People are talking about trans folks in sports when they may not know any trans people. It’s just this abstraction of who we are, and I think that you know it really will have downstream effects because at some point there’s gonna be the moment of like, “Hey we need you to trust us we’re the government” When I was doing mpox at the White House, it was all about being a trusted messenger to the population so that they trusted what we were doing to be able to help end the outbreak or at least to control it. So imagine now if all of a sudden CDC gets up and says like, “Hey transgender folks, there’s an outbreak in your population and here’s what we want you to do.” Are they going to listen? Would you listen?

SM: Right, wow.

DD: And that’s not going to go away. That’s not gonna be like, “Oh, everything has changed. We have midterm elections, we have a new administration and everything’s going to be hunky dory.” It’s like moments of impact that create decades of trauma. And so, I think that we are going to have a really hard path forward to be able to get LGBTQ people, frankly, to trust public health.

SM: Wow, that’s a really interesting thing that I hadn’t thought about that much. What other health issues that disproportionately affect LGBTQ people are you concerned about as it relates to what the Trump administration has done since its second term began?

DD: Spencer, when I was in New York City, and I think that’s where we met, I put out guidance for COVID for sexually active people. And so when I was working in mpox, I was involved in also creating guidance that was very frank, just like what I did in New York City around mpox. And they just took it down.

SM: Wow, they just took it down.

DD: If you didn’t download it, it’s just been taken off. The HHS spokesperson, when I asked why it was taken down, said that it didn’t have adequate scientific review and was pulled down. So that’s a lie. It actually went through a full scientific review at CDC. It was reviewed by the mpox team. It was reviewed by the sexually transmitted infection folks, by the HIV folks. It was fully reviewed, it was scientifically sound, and they just took it down because they didn’t like it because it was too woke.

SM: Wow. Wow.

DD: And that’s what we’re up against. No scientist wanted to take that down. That was a fully political decision. And so, like, what are you going to point to if you have highly sexually active people who are at risk for mpox? Are you going to point to abstinence? Didn’t work for HIV and it won’t work for mpox.

SM: Well, you said something earlier, “moments of impact that create decades of trauma.” Obviously, it’s at least expected that Trump will leave office in 2028, right? What’s the road to getting an American public that, an LGBTQ American public, that trusts the CDC, that trusts these institutions, that had a reputation that was relatively trustworthy up until the last two years.

DD: Yeah. I mean, I think that the way that you gain trust is by proving that you deserve it. Right? So as a former government official and as an LGBTQ leader and an LGBTQ person, y’all got some work to do to prove it.

SM: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

DD: And that means really centering equity again and centering data and evidence and getting rid of this public policy by vibes, which is what all of this is.

SM: Public policy by vibes.

DD: Totally. The vibe is that if you attack LGBTQ people, you’re going to do better in some parts of the country with your voter base.

SM: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

DD: Great. That’s probably true. That kills people. And that’s not what Americans do. That’s not what Americans should do. But that is what America is currently doing. Unless we change course.

SM: OK, well, I think that’s a good place to end. Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, thanks so much for speaking with me and Uncloseted Media today.

DD: Spencer, thanks for having me.

SM: And to get all our investigative journalism, go to unclosetedmedia.com or subscribe to our YouTube page or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Additional reporting by Hope Pisoni

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