When Dissent Becomes Domestic Terrorism

The call is coming from inside HHS

Credit: NBC News

The shooting at the CDC last week was the inevitable result of a long campaign of lies and propaganda meant to detract from America’s public health capacity. The shooter was reportedly motivated by his belief that he was injured by COVID vaccines. He blamed this on the CDC. So he went to the CDC in Atlanta and opened fire on civil servants at work. Targeting US government employees with lethal force based on unsupported objections to US government policy is terrorism. This achieves a new benchmark in terrible precedents, since this was the first act of domestic terrorism taking place as a result of disinformation spread by the cabinet secretary in charge of the government agency that was attacked.

US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. waited nearly a full day to respond in any way. Unsurprisingly, his response didn’t land as either a particularly sincere expression of condolences or an inspiring display of leadership in crisis. Kennedy has attacked the CDC for years in his quest to increase mortality from vaccine-preventable diseases. He previously referred to the CDC as a “cesspool of corruption” filled with Big Pharma shills forcing Americans to take safe and effective vaccines (just kidding, he actually falsely said the vaccines are dangerous and don’t work). As HHS Secretary, he has abused the power of his office to undermine CDC at every opportunity.

A delayed and half-assed “thoughts and prayers” post from the most notorious and powerful public health-hating quack in the game is insufficient to persuade most thinking people with brains that he actually cares at all, much less is “deeply saddened” by a police officer’s murder or empathizes with his “shaken” colleagues at CDC. The civil servants who were shot at and terrorized at work were so accustomed to Kennedy’s relentless attacks against his own workforce that many had already resigned themselves to being targeted with violence. They are further demoralized now, because they know that he cultivated the beliefs that led to bullet holes in their office windows.

My deepest sympathies for the violence I have inflicted upon you

Kennedy does not care that he contributed to this. He also certainly knows that he has. For decades, anti-vaxxers have vilified experts to discredit scientific arguments against their own claims. Children’s Health Defense, the organization Kennedy founded, has a long history of attacking individual scientists as well as entire institutions and professional fields, if they perceive them as a threat or an easy target.

This tactic is often very successful for getting experts to withhold criticism, drive them out of public discussions about topics like vaccines, or bully them into submission. Most government scientists are not public figures. It is extremely upsetting and disorienting to be targeted for your expertise or your scientific work. Often people don’t know what to do when faced with an angry mob, online or in real life. You don’t know when the dehumanizing rhetoric and verbal abuse will escalate into violence. You don’t know which face in the crowd is that of an armchair warrior and which is someone who might have a weapon. You can’t plan ahead for what will happen when you are confronted by an enraged stranger, who is furious with you for reasons that are entirely fictional but that do not matter in the moment. You feel terrifyingly vulnerable, but you also feel like you’re overreacting. Because 99% of the threats are empty, but you never know when an actually homicidal person might come along with a gun, attracted by the steady stream of anti-public health propaganda that mobilizes them.

Since 2020, I have been enough of a public figure that I’ve gotten my fair share of hostility, mostly for my position on vaccines and my research on the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. Most often this is opprobrium on social media, but sometimes it’s also emails, calls to my office, and occasional actual mail. Often this is very personal, targeting my appearance, my age, my body, my sexuality, my relationships, my family, my scientific ability, my academic status, my intelligence, or my humanity in general. Sometimes things that start online don’t stay online. I once filed a complaint against some fellow academics for their social media conduct, and it resulted in one of them confronting me in person last year and screaming at me and another female colleague that we were destroying society because we assessed the lab leak hypothesis to be unsupported by current evidence. Attacks can range from a bot regurgitating MAHA anti-vax witticisms at me to explicit sexual assault or death threats. Ending up on a 4chan “kill list” for my professional contributions along with 5 of my colleagues was a particularly unwelcome and disturbing experience.

Colleagues’ names redacted since this appeal for our murder by mass shooting contained personal information about them and their families

We reported this to law enforcement in several countries, but nothing could be done because the person who posted it was anonymous. Also, because it was an exhortation to violence but the promised violence hadn’t been attempted, no crime had yet occurred. We just had to be vigilant and hope that this plea was insufficiently compelling to motivate a crazy person to murder us. It was bad enough to learn that randos on 4chan were encouraging would-be mass shooters to target me, my colleagues, and our families. I can’t imagine how the people at CDC must feel, knowing that the person directing mass shooters their way is the guy in charge of the entire department.

Since becoming HHS Secretary, Kennedy has continued to demonize CDC at every opportunity, while framing his self-serving, ideologically driven anti-vax agenda as legitimate scientific dissent. In addition to calling the agency a cesspool of corruption, he also said the CDC’s immunization programs were fascist, compared the CDC’s stewardship of vaccine safety data to the Vatican’s cover-up of child sexual abuse by Catholic clergy, and likened childhood vaccination programs to “Nazi death camps.” Kennedy has been talking about CDC in these pejorative, accusatory, and completely false terms since 2013. He continues to do so, on official HHS letterhead.

Government public health scientists, who have devoted their careers to serving the American people by improving their health, safety, and well-being, are presented by Kennedy as depraved crooks on the take, who are propping up a more sinister plot by pharmaceutical companies to profit from harming children with out-of-control vaccination campaigns. Kennedy never provides evidence to support these allegations, because they are all lies. Easily disproven anti-vax pseudoscientific theories about thimerosal, adjuvants, vaccine research, and vaccine safety are being gildwashed as “Gold Standard Science” and used to make policy that will lay waste to vaccine access nationwide. Kennedy just cancelled $500 million in BARDA contracts for mRNA vaccine development, claiming falsely that these vaccines didn’t work (they do) and they selected for more dangerous mutants that render vaccines completely ineffective (they don’t and neither evolution nor immunology work that way). Kennedy is surrounded by an aura of vaccine disinformation. He projects it from every leathery pore. And for years, he has projected a target directly on the CDC.

It is not a surprise, but an inevitability that eventually one of Kennedy’s MAHA faithful would take him at his word that CDC employees are bad people harming others and decided to violently intervene. The attack was motivated by disinformation that the HHS Secretary publicly endorses in his official capacity and is ardently dedicated to spreading. Kennedy has repeatedly directed hatred and distrust at CDC, public health, and science in general, to further his own ideological agenda against vaccination programs. This is not dissent. This is domestic terrorism.

Whether through resignation or impeachment, Kennedy must be removed.