Another Dr. Stockmann

 The Trump administration's new CDC director now has to fight for her position—after no more than a month on the job—seemingly for no other reason than because she took seriously the responsibilities of her office: such as providing sound evidence-based public health advice to the public. 

Dr. Monarez appears to have clashed with RFK Jr. over his attempts to undermine vaccines. The news of her struggle with senior administration officials—after all—comes the same day Trump's FDA announced unprecedented new restrictions on access for the latest round of the COVID boosters. 

It also comes shortly on the heels of the Trump administration's decision to slash funding for research into life-saving mRNA vaccines. And it comes just after an attack by a lone gunman on the CDC's offices—which many believed was inspired by the administration's smearing of the agency's work. 

It's hard to understand why these public health officials have become the targets of persecution so soon after saving millions of American lives from the global pandemic. After all—their only "crime was to be kind/ To render with th[eir] precepts less/ The sum of human wretchedness." (Byron). 

But such has always been the fate of the benefactors of humanity. “Everything must be paid for, the good no less than the evil," as Louis-Ferdinand Céline once put it, in his life of Ignaz Semmelweis—the doctor who invented antisepsis and then suffered a lifetime of rejection and scorn for it. 

"Just suppose that today, even, some innocent should happen along setting himself the task of curing cancer. He does not know to what kind of music they would set him dancing! [...] Ah! It would be much safer to enlist at once in the Foreign Legion"—wrote Céline (Parker trans.)

Semmelweis (who was despised by his colleagues simply for recommending that they sterilize their obstetric equipment before operating on women in labor) was the model in turn for Henrik Ibsen's Dr. Stockmann, in his play An Enemy of the People (a work all too relevant to our time). 

The play describes a physician in a small town who discovers a source of infection in the local water supply. He thinks—naïvely—that he will be applauded for saving so many lives. But instead, the town resents him and persecutes him for being an inconvenient scold and the bearer of bad news. 

Here, to be sure, we have a parable for the entire course of the public reaction to the pandemic. Countless Dr. Stockmanns worked brutal hours to spare our lives or save us from having to be hospitalized and hooked up to a ventilator. And we have never stopped persecuting them for it since.