More than 750 current and former staffers at the US Health and Human Services implored Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in a letter Wednesday to “stop spreading inaccurate health information” after a shooter fired hundreds of rounds at the headquarters of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention earlier this month.
The letter, also addressed to members of Congress, noted “the violent August 8th attack on CDC’s headquarters in Atlanta was not random.” The Georgia Bureau of Investigation reported that the shooter had expressed discontent with the Covid-19 vaccine and wanted to make his distrust known.
“The attack came amid growing mistrust in public institutions, driven by politicized rhetoric that has turned public health professionals from trusted experts into targets of villainization – and now, violence,” wrote the staffers, who emphasized they signed the letter “in our own personal capacities.” Some signed anonymously “out of fear of retaliation and personal safety.”
The August 8 shooting pockmarked multiple buildings at the nation’s public health agency with bullet holes and killed DeKalb County Police Officer David Rose, whom the staffers emphasized they wished to honor.
The staffers wrote that Kennedy, who helmed an anti-vaccine advocacy group before President Donald Trump named him health secretary, “is complicit in dismantling America’s public health infrastructure and endangering the nation’s health by repeatedly spreading inaccurate health information.”
They cited previous comments from Kennedy calling CDC a “cesspool of corruption” and HHS’ termination of thousands of employees in a “destroy-first-and-ask-questions-later manner,” leaving gaps in areas including detection of infectious diseases, worker safety and chronic disease prevention. They also said “many CDC workers who focused on issues such as injury and violence prevention have been fired,” hampering the agency’s ability to respond to emergencies.
They also focused on Kennedy’s claims about vaccines, including mRNA shots and measles vaccines, saying he’s “undermining public health outbreak response,” and decried his dismissal of the entire Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the influential panel of outside vaccine advisers to the CDC, and previous comments falsely tying vaccines to autism.
HHS didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Kennedy said in an August 9 post on social media that “we are actively supporting CDC staff on the ground and across the agency. Public health workers show up every day with purpose — even in moments of grief and uncertainty.”
Kennedy visited CDC headquarters two days later. But his response was criticized by public health leaders such as former US Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams, who called it “delayed and tepid.”
In their letter, the HHS employees asked Kennedy to “cease and publicly disavow the ongoing dissemination of false and misleading claims about vaccines, infectious disease transmission, and America’s public health institutions;” affirm the scientific integrity of the CDC; and guarantee the safety of the HHS workforce.
“If the very people that are supposed to be protecting Americans are not safe, then no American is safe,” Dr. Anne Schuchat, former principal deputy director of the CDC, said in a statement. “An attack on a US government agency should be a moment in time when we come together. Instead, Secretary Kennedy continues to spread misinformation at the risk of American lives.”
NIH staffers who signed the letter also said they called on Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya “to refrain from his dangerous politicization of mRNA vaccine technology.”
NIH did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The administration earlier this month said it was dismantling funding of mRNA vaccine development because the vaccines “fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections like COVID and flu.”
Researchers have estimated that Covid-19 vaccines saved more than 2.5 million lives.
