‘An existential threat': US health workers call Robert F Kennedy Jr a risk to public health

The Guardian

7 hours ago

Current and former employees at US health agencies released a letter on Wednesday outlining how misinformation spread by Robert F Kennedy Jr is endangering the lives of federal employees and the American people.
Experts emphasized to the Guardian that he's 'an existential threat to public health'.
On 8 August, a gunman killed a police officer, David Rose, and fired nearly 500 bullets, shattering 150 windows, at the Atlanta headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The man, who was killed on the scene, believed the Covid-19 vaccine caused his depression.
Kennedy, secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), has been 'complicit in dismantling America's public health infrastructure and endangering the nation's health by repeatedly spreading inaccurate health information', said the letter, which was signed by more than 750 current and former employees from HHS agencies, including the CDC and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and addressed to Kennedy and the US Congress. The employees drafted the letter in their personal capacity, they said.
Pressure against Kennedy is mounting in public health.
'When your own leadership peddles falsehoods, it doesn't just erode the public trust, it creates the conditions for the kind of violence that we saw on Friday,' Yolanda Jacobs, president of American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) local 2883 and a CDC employee, told reporters last week. 'This was a targeted attack. It was a targeted act of violence against not just CDC, but CDC's employees.'
The shooting was 'public health's Jan 6,' Colin Carlson, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Yale University's School of Public Health, co-wrote in an op-ed calling for the resignation of health officials, including Kennedy, who have spread dangerous misinformation.
'To me, the worst case scenario is, and has always been, that someone shows up with a gun,' Carlson said. 'It's really important that we do something now, while we can, before the shooting that kills more people. Because this will keep happening. It will spread, and it will get worse.'
Kennedy, a prominent anti-vaccine advocate for two decades, has called the CDC a 'cesspool of corruption'. He has made numerous false claims about mRNA vaccines, calling Covid vaccines the 'deadliest vaccine ever made'. He replaced members of the CDC's vaccine advisory committee with largely inexperienced advisers, some of whom have histories of anti-vaccine activism.
One of the advisers, Robert Malone, posted violent images directed at scientists in the hours before and soon after the CDC shooting, prompting the Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal, of Connecticut, to demand his removal and the restoration of the original experts to the committee.
The letter on Wednesday decried the 'deliberate destruction of trust in America's public health workforce', which puts employees at risk of violence and keeps them from working to protect the health of Americans.
Kennedy's 'dangerous and deceitful statements and actions have contributed to the harassment and violence experienced by CDC staff', the letter read.
Matthew Buckham, Kennedy's acting chief of staff, was co-founder of the group that maintains a 'DEI Watch List' targeting HHS employees.
Watch lists like these have published the photos and personal home addresses of federal workers, who have been threatened in their homes, said Vi Le, an expert on preventing gun violence.
When Le heard about the shooting, she scrambled to pull together resources for CDC employees.
But she didn't do it on behalf of the CDC; she did it as a volunteer with the AFGE. That's because in April, her entire department on preventing gun violence in the US was let go.
Yet when asked how he would address misinformation leading to violence in the wake of the CDC shooting, Kennedy pointed to past public health officials who he said 'have not been honest' about Covid vaccines.
'An attack on a US government agency should be a moment in time when we come together,' Dr Anne Schuchat, former principal deputy director of the CDC, said in a statement about the letter. 'Instead, Secretary Kennedy continues to spread misinformation at the risk of American lives.'
The HHS did not respond by press time to the Guardian's media inquiries about the role of health officials in promoting misinformation that may lead to violence.
Employees also called on the NIH director, Jay Bhattacharya, to 'refrain from his dangerous politicization of mRNA vaccine technology'.
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The day after the CDC shooting, Bhattacharya appeared on Steve Bannon's podcast to push back on what he characterized as health officials' 'relentless propaganda and pressure' to take the mRNA Covid vaccines.
Bhattacharya spoke about how the former director of the CDC, Rochelle Walensky, was 'blinded' to the 'facts' of the vaccine, which he said had harmful side effects.
'As far as public health goes, for vaccines the mRNA platform is no longer viable,' Bhattacharya said.
It echoed previous statements of his putting the blame for anti-vaccine sentiment on US officials. In July 2024, Bhattacharya said that people who claimed to be injured by vaccines became 'public enemy number one in 2021', adding they were seen as a 'threat' to officials' efforts to distribute vaccines.
Last week, Bhattacharya published an op-ed arguing that 'mRNA technology has failed to earn the public's trust'.
'Within days of the shooting, all of these guys were back out there immediately talking about how dangerous vaccines are,' Carlson said.
'We see them condemn the violence and act like they had nothing to do with it, and then we also see them repeat the messaging that the shooter believed.'
Rhetoric about the harms of vaccines, and the alleged dangers posed by health officials, is circulated and amplified in anti-vaccine circles, especially online.
The man arrested for killing Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, in June told the conservative blog the Blaze that he confronted the couple because he believed the mRNA shots were killing people.
Violence is the point of decades of anti-vaccine and anti-scientific disinformation – not a byproduct but a tool, Carlson said. Stochastic terrorism, in which public figures use mass media to inspire political violence, has been used to harm trans people and abortion providers, for example, in the past.
'They've learned the comfortable distance between incitement and violence,' Carlson said. 'The Maga movement is incredibly good at saying just enough and distributing the burden of incitement within its ecosystem, letting the people at the top set the messaging and then having places like rightwing news outlets and social media sites do the work of amplifying and accelerating and putting violence to the messaging.'
Removing officials like Kennedy and preventing future violence is 'the only path' to restoring trust in public health, Carlson said.
He added: 'This is an existential threat to public health. If we fight and lose, that's OK, but I would rather fight and lose than lie down.'