After sheltering under desks and behind barricaded doors while an anti-vaxx gunman sprayed more than 150 bullets into CDC headquarters, and then watching the agency’s newly appointed director get forcibly ejected just a few weeks later, it would’ve seemed that things couldn’t get any worse for those employed by the country’s foremost public-health agency.

But then they got what seemed like an AI-generated email from the new boss.

Jim O’Neill, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s deputy at the Department of Health and Human Services, had been tapped to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after, by all accounts, no one else was willing to agree to Kennedy’s demands for changes at the agency. Kennedy announced O’Neill’s new role in an email to staff on August 28, just one day after Susan

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