Current and former employees of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and other parts of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, have sent a letter to Congress and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., calling him complicit in endangering them and the health of Americans.
The letter asks for Kennedy’s help in protecting them.
The letter comes on the heels of the Aug. 8 shooting at the CDC, in which a gunman shot nearly 500 rounds at the CDC headquarters on Clifton Road and killed DeKalb County Police officer David Rose, who confronted him.
About 330 people signed the version of the letter that was sent out, the organizers said. About another 430 signed but asked that their names be kept private for fear of reprisal, they said.
Overall, more than 600 of the 760 signatories are from the CDC.
The health workers cited Kennedy’s history of calling the CDC a “cesspool of corruption,” repeatedly spreading inaccurate information and dismantling the nation’s public health infrastructure, according to the letter.
Calling the actions “dangerous and deceitful,” the letter maintains that Kennedy’s behavior “contributed to the harassment and violence experienced by CDC staff.”
“When a federal health agency is under attack, America’s health is under attack,” the letter says.
The letter asks Kennedy to stop spreading inaccurate information; to affirm the CDC’s scientific integrity; and to guarantee the safety of the HHS workforce.
Neither HHS officials nor Kennedy responded to a request for comment from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Following the shooting, Kennedy posted about fishing in Alaska before he posted about the incident. He issued a statement the next day, and two days later gave one broadcast interview to Scripps News during which he condemned the shooting.
President Donald Trump, who called the shooting at Fort Stewart the same week an “atrocity,” has said nothing about the CDC shooting — or the officer who was killed.
“We were all brokenhearted, not only for our CDC colleagues, but for all Americans,” Dr. Anne Schuchat, former principal deputy director of the CDC, said in a note accompanying the letter. “If the very people that are supposed to be protecting Americans are not safe, then no American is safe.
“An attack on a U.S. 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.”
The misinformation and dangerous actions referred to in the letter include Kennedy dismantling leadership that approves vaccines for kids; his insistence that the measles vaccine is related to increasing autism rates; and his cancellation of $500 million in research funds for mRNA vaccines.
The mRNA technology, which underlaid the COVID-19 vaccines produced at record speed, won the Nobel Prize and is credited with saving millions of lives.
After Kennedy fired the entire membership of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, he began filling slots with people whose judgment he trusted. One of them, Dr. Robert Malone, posted on a blog images of a machine gun and a meme with the words “if you need a disarmed society to govern, you suck at governing.” That was less than 48 hours after the shooting.
A survey released independently Wednesday morning by The Physicians Foundation found that 86% of doctors surveyed reported seeing an increase in misinformation from patients in the last five years.
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