- Joined
- Jun 18, 2018
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"...public-health workers have been facing escalating hostility since the early days of the pandemic. ...Last year, Fauci told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that threats of violence to public-health workers correlate with verbal attacks from high-profile politicians and media personalities. “It’s like clockwork,” he said. In the second Trump administration, those attacks have become commonplace—the very selling points, even, that have helped a number of Trump’s health appointees gain their positions. In 2024, when announcing his own pick for CDC director, President Donald Trump maligned the CDC and other federal health agencies, accusing them of having “engaged in censorship, data manipulation, and misinformation.” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was already a longtime anti-vaccine activist when he took the mantle as America’s health secretary; he has compared vaccinating children to the abuses of the Catholic church. During his own 2024 presidential run, he promised to “clean up the cesspool of corruption at CDC.”
“Normally, threats to public servants aren’t inspired from leadership of their own organization,” another CDC staffer said in a group chat among current and former employees. According to an MSNBC report, during an all-hands meeting today, CDC staff blamed the shooting at least partly on Kennedy’s combative attitude toward the agency. “We need them to stop fanning the flames of hatred against us, stop spreading misinformation,” one employee wrote in the meeting chat, naming Kennedy in the same comment. “We will not be safe until they stop their attacks against us.”
...For CDC staff, the wider threat does not seem to have passed. This evening, a group of CDC employees were trading tips on peeling off their old parking decals after the agency’s security office reportedly asked staff to remove them from their cars. One person suggested covering them with other stickers; another recommended loosening them with cooking oil. Even people who have volunteered for risky missions in their public-health work are still getting used to the idea that the danger has arrived at the home front. “I’ve put my life on the line for this agency, responding to outbreaks in some of the most dangerous parts of the world,” a 13-year veteran of the agency told me. “I didn’t expect to face the same risks at the Atlanta campus as I faced in South Sudan.”
Link
Motivation for the attacks are now coming from inside the building.
“Normally, threats to public servants aren’t inspired from leadership of their own organization,” another CDC staffer said in a group chat among current and former employees. According to an MSNBC report, during an all-hands meeting today, CDC staff blamed the shooting at least partly on Kennedy’s combative attitude toward the agency. “We need them to stop fanning the flames of hatred against us, stop spreading misinformation,” one employee wrote in the meeting chat, naming Kennedy in the same comment. “We will not be safe until they stop their attacks against us.”
...For CDC staff, the wider threat does not seem to have passed. This evening, a group of CDC employees were trading tips on peeling off their old parking decals after the agency’s security office reportedly asked staff to remove them from their cars. One person suggested covering them with other stickers; another recommended loosening them with cooking oil. Even people who have volunteered for risky missions in their public-health work are still getting used to the idea that the danger has arrived at the home front. “I’ve put my life on the line for this agency, responding to outbreaks in some of the most dangerous parts of the world,” a 13-year veteran of the agency told me. “I didn’t expect to face the same risks at the Atlanta campus as I faced in South Sudan.”
Link
Motivation for the attacks are now coming from inside the building.
