Local health officials report threats, vandalism and harassment during the pandemic

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Local health officials report threats, vandalism and harassment during the pandemic

Fri, 2022-03-18 13:09 — mike kraft

Local health officials report threats, vandalism and harassment during the pandemic, study finds Local health officials handling the day-to-day response to the coronavirus crisis have faced hostility like never before in their communities. Salvador Rizzo Washington Post

Local health officials handling the day-to-day response to the coronavirus crisis have faced hostility like never before, according to a new study of 1,499 episodes of harassment during the first year of the pandemic.

Of 583 local health departments surveyed by Johns Hopkins University researchers, 57 percent reported episodes of staff being targeted with personal threats, doxing, vandalism and other forms of harassment from 2020 to 2021.

From the early months of the pandemic, former president Donald Trump, Fox News personalities and right-wing commentators on social media unleashed a wave of criticism and specious claims against Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and many other officials who were promoting the use of face masks, vaccines, shutdown measures and social distancing.

Fauci has faced death threats and has been under stepped-up security protection since 2020. But the threats and denunciations are not limited to federal and state health officials.

Beth Resnick, assistant dean for public health practice at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and senior author of the study, said federal and state officials are more accustomed to rolling with the punches of politics.

“But in these small communities, this is all brand new, it’s really shocking, and it’s never happened before,” Resnick said. For a local health department with two or three employees, losing any employee could be “devastating.”

The researchers found that 222 health officials left their posts at local or state health agencies, more than one-third of them alongside harassment reports. The pandemic’s strain was not the only reason for these departures, however, which also included chronic underfunding of health agencies and the increasing partisan polarization in public health.

“Particularly in rural communities, health officials described challenges in being the public representative of a policy that was not always within their authority to decide,” the study says.

“Think about if you’re in a small community and you go to the grocery store, and someone starts yelling at you,” Resnick said. “This is really detrimental to our field, to our culture, to our public health community.” ...

Experts said the findings, published Thursday in the American Journal of Public Health, should serve as a wake-up call. The attacks on public health officials, and the ensuing staff drain and recruitment difficulties, may leave Americans more exposed to diseases, pandemics and other communal health risks, they said.

Michael Fraser, chief executive of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, said health officials and agencies always have faced some measure of controversy, “but this has really become personal, it’s become dangerous — we have to have health officials with state police, with armed guards.”...

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