Mostly, they are good people wanting to do good work, but imo, public health agencies have become a para-intelligence services with explicitly political aims. There is a network of academics who see health and health information as a policy lever, and they have been out in force leveraging it through public health agencies during the pandemic.
I think they have discredited themselves over travel bans, vax passports, the objectively insane and poisonous rhetoric about the "hesitant," and arbitrary mandates with no accountability for those who enforced them. I don't think they can be trusted to be arbiters of science for people with a basic statistical reasoning skills and a belief in the existence of truth. The article articulates a more general and relevant sentiment, which is that the medical establishment has forfeited its public trust.
Many, if not most of the epidemiologists at the CDC hold M.Ds, and I can speak from personal experience that many have disdain for both political parties
For example there is a lot of frustration at how the media is making a giant scare about Monkeypox, when it is isolated to certain communities and can be prevented with the smallpox vaccine which we already have stockpiled.
> they operate as surveillance organizations with the same kind of secrecy culture as intelligence work
This is blatantly false - the CDC publishes almost everything it does. Mostly boring statistics, reporting, investigating claims
>public health agencies have become a para-intelligence services with explicitly political aims
Really?
>I think they have discredited themselves over travel bans, vax passports, the objectively insane and poisonous rhetoric about the "hesitant,"
You should visit the CDC's public museum in Atlanta - I think you will see all the good that vaccines and antibiotics have done for the world. Little else in medicine matters, comparatively, in terms of increased lifespans around the globe