Last Friday, a man shot up the Centers for Disease Control buildings [gift] near Atlanta. The shooter is dead and so is a policeman who apparently got in his way. Investigators have not yet reported what they think went down. According to the shooter's family, he was suicidal and fixated on vaccines. Law enforcement officers found several long guns near his body.
This violent attack was neither random -- nor, fortunately, effectually targeted.
The attack also raised understandable questions about Donald Trump's Secretary of Health and Human Services, the COVID vaccine denier Robert F Kennedy Jr. Mr Kennedy said appropriate words about the shooting at one of the institutions he "leads," but who can believe him?
Dr. Katelyn Jetelina, MPH PhD, writes the substack Your Local Epidemiologist sharing information and reflections on the state of the practice of public health. She explains from the perspective of the workers:
The hardest-hit area was the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases (NCIRD) and the Immunization Safety Office (ISO). These are people who have carried a lot of the weight of the pandemic, endured relentless hostility, and have faced six months of attacks on vaccine policy. Many have almost no reserves left. And now, on top of everything, they were literally under fire.
Those bullet holes are a haunting, terrible metaphor for what public health has endured over the past six months—and the past six years.
We’ve endured doxxing, hacking, strangers at our homes, death threats in our inboxes, croissants thrown at us in coffee shops. Installing a new security system just because we volunteer for something or show up on TV. Wearing heart monitors because our cortisol levels have started impacting our organs. Deciding not to put our kids in daycare at the CDC campus because it may be targeted. Then firings. Defunding. Politically charged and targeted rhetoric.
And now a shooting happened. It could have been much worse if it weren’t for a police officer—who left behind three kids of his own—making the ultimate sacrifice. This doesn’t make it any less scary.
Jetelina continues, trying to make sense of the atrocious and inexplicable.
One question keeps coming up from colleagues in my text messages: Why do we keep doing this [keep working in public health]?But make no mistake: this cannot be the cost of caring. We need more than patched glass. We need a country that values the people who protect it, recognizes the importance of words and their real-world consequences, and values community and neighbors, not just self. Now. Before the next shot is fired.
I know why. Because people in public health care too much about our country to stop. Because we care about our kids’ futures. Because we believe in a better life. Better community. Better health. We will serve our neighbors even if they don’t understand what we’re doing or why it matters. It’s in the blood of public health workers, woven into every late night, every hard decision, every moment we choose service over family or safety, whether it’s running into an Ebola outbreak or writing a policy brief.
In the next week, the glass will be patched, the windows replaced, the bullets swept from the floor. And this story (which has barely made the news) will vanish. But the trauma, the fear, the exhaustion will remain.
We’ll go back to our desks, our meetings, our spreadsheets. We’ll keep working to stop the spread of disease. We’ll keep working to prevent the next shooting. We’ll keep working for communities that may never know our names.
And we’ll do it knowing we were targeted simply for doing our jobs, jobs that protect even the people who hate us.• • •
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