I Thought the CDC Shooting Was Rock Bottom. We're Still Sinking.
(MedPage Today) -- A year ago, a gunman fired 500 rounds at the CDC campus, killing DeKalb County Police Officer David Rose. I was inside the building during the attack. Authorities said the shooter was radicalized by the anti-vaccine conspiracy...
A year ago, a gunman opened fire at the CDC campus, killing one officer. The shooter was believed to have been radicalized by anti-vaccine conspiracy theories. The secretary of Health and Human Services is still Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The reporter sat in the Emergency Operations Center yesterday and saw him walk through the room, shaking his hand.
The reporter expected to feel rage, but instead felt despair and exhaustion. The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is the largest in the country's history, with over 4,000 confirmed cases and 2,000 deaths. The outbreak is accelerating and on track to surpass the 2014-2016 West Africa outbreak. The U.S. has issued an order keeping both foreign nationals and U.S. citizens out of the country for 21 days if they've been in the Congo, even if they don't have symptoms.
This policy does not make Americans safer and sends a clear signal to aid workers and humanitarian staff not to go to the Congo. The U.S. is also facing other public health crises, including a measles outbreak and a widespread Cyclospora outbreak. Despite these crises, the CDC has lost a quarter of its workforce over the past 18 months.
Erica Schwartz, MD, MPH, starts as CDC's first Senate-confirmed director in nearly a year, but her ability to turn things around is uncertain.
Written by urgent.news from MedPage Today's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
