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Some 750 national wellness employees signed the missive 2 weeks aft a gunman fired 180 bullets into CDC buildings.
Published On 21 Aug 2025
Hundreds of national wellness employees person written to United States Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, imploring him to “stop spreading inaccurate wellness information”, weeks aft a gunman fired hundreds of bullets into the office of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) successful Atlanta.
Signatories to the missive connected Wednesday, including hundreds of existent HHS staff, accused Kennedy of “sowing nationalist mistrust by questioning the integrity and morality of CDC’s workforce”, including by calling the nationalist wellness bureau a “cesspool of corruption”, during his 2024 failed statesmanlike election campaign.
They besides said that Kennedy’s policies, including cuts to thousands of HHS employees, were creating “dangerous gaps successful areas similar infectious diseases detection, idiosyncratic safety, and chronic illness prevention and response”.
“The deliberate demolition of spot successful America’s nationalist wellness workforce puts lives astatine risk,” the workers said, noting that Kennedy had dispersed mendacious claims astir the measles vaccine, undermining the nationalist wellness outbreak effect to the disease.
They besides noted that the caller onslaught connected the CDC gathering was different illustration of the dangers resulting from the wellness secretary’s words.
The shooter, who had publically expressed his distrust of COVID-19 vaccines, opened occurrence astatine the CDC office successful Atlanta, Georgia, fatally shooting constabulary serviceman David Rose, 33, earlier dying of a self-inflicted gunshot coiled connected August 8.
In a connection shared with US media outlets, the HHS said that “Secretary Kennedy is lasting firmly with CDC employees – some connected the crushed and crossed each halfway – ensuring their information and wellbeing stay a apical priority”.
Kennedy has agelong been accused of spreading vaccine misinformation, including successful a 2019 sojourn to Samoa, which came months earlier a measles outbreak connected the South Pacific land which killed 81 people, mostly babies and young children.
In an interrogation with The Guardian paper earlier this year, Samoa’s premier minister, Fiame Naomi Mataʻafa, expressed astonishment that Kennedy, who denies being against vaccines, was chosen arsenic US wellness secretary.
More recently, Kennedy has cancelled hundreds of millions of dollars successful backing for probe into mRNA vaccines, a aesculapian breakthrough credited with preventing millions of deaths from COVID-19 and having the imaginable to dainty diseases specified arsenic crab and HIV, according to the International Vaccine Access Center astatine Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
William Foege, who served arsenic the manager of the CDC from 1977 to 1983, penned an nonfiction successful US wellness outlet Stat News this week, urging nationalist wellness workers to “not backmost down”.
“We volition unrecorded done this drought of values, principles, and facts and again use our talents to improving planetary wellness and happiness,” helium wrote.
Foege, who has been credited with playing an instrumental relation successful eradicating smallpox, a microorganism that was fatal successful 30 percent of cases, went connected to pass that Kennedy’s words were dangerous.
“In the meantime, beryllium clear. Kennedy’s words tin beryllium arsenic lethal arsenic the smallpox virus. Americans merit better,” helium wrote.
Source:
Al Jazeera and quality agencies
English (US) ·