US health workers implore RFK Jr to ‘stop spreading inaccurate’ information

In a letter to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the head of the United States’ Health and Human Services (HHS) department, a number of federal health employees have written to him to “stop spreading false health information,” following a gunman’s hundreds of bullets into the Atlanta headquarters.

In a letter on Wednesday, signatories to the letter, including hundreds of current HHS employees, accused Kennedy of “sowing public mistrust” by “fragmenting the moral character and character of the CDC’s workforce,” including by calling the public health agency a “cesspool of corruption” during his 2024 unsuccessful presidential election campaign.

They added that Kennedy’s policies, including the elimination of thousands of HHS employees, were “dangerous gaps in areas like infectious diseases detection, worker safety, and chronic disease prevention and response.”

The workers claimed that Kennedy had made false claims about the measles vaccine, undermining the public health outbreak response to the disease, and that “the deliberate destruction of trust in America’s public health workforce puts lives in danger.”

They also noted that the health secretary’s words were another illustration of the dangers that the recent attack on the CDC building presented.

The shooter fatally shot police officer David Rose, 33, before passing away from a self-inflicted gunshot wound on August 8 at the CDC headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia after publicly expressing his disapproval of COVID-19 vaccines.

Secretary Kennedy said in a statement that was shared with US media outlets that “Secretary Kennedy is firmly committed to ensuring CDC employees’ safety and wellbeing remain top priorities both on the ground and everywhere.”

Kennedy has long been accused of disseminating false information about vaccines, most recently during a 2019 trip to Samoa, which occurred months before a measles outbreak that claimed the South Pacific island and killed 81 people, mostly young children and infants.

Fiame Naomi Mataafa, the prime minister of Samoa, reportedly expressed surprise that Kennedy, who denies opposing vaccines, was chosen as the US health secretary in an interview with The Guardian earlier this year.

According to the International Vaccine Access Center at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Kennedy has cancelled hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for mRNA vaccine research, which is credited with preventing millions of deaths from COVID-19 and having the potential to treat diseases like cancer and HIV.

This week, William Foege, who served as the CDC’s director from 1977 to 1983, wrote an article for US news outlet Stat News exhorting public health workers to “not back down.”

We will continue to live in this world without values, principles, and facts, and use our talents to restore world peace and harmony, he declared.

Foege continued by expressing concern that Kennedy’s words were dangerous and that she had been instrumental in eradicating smallpox, a virus that was fatal in 30% of cases.