The vituperation or invective, the bitter companion of the more warmly disposed progymnasmata of the encomium, provides lessons for how we might examine the battle over expert ethos during the COVID-19 pandemic. Public modes of engagement of experts and scientists have received both constructive criticism and strategic and targeted bad faith criticism. In this chapter, it is the latter case of criticism we investigate, and seek to understand the specific rhetorical appeals that aim not to build better public health knowledge but merely abuse and malign individual experts. We examine examples of vituperations targeting specific public health officers, both online and in traditional media. We focus on identifying patterns of rhetorical appeals through a case study of a Canadian public health official to understand the nature of contemporary vituperations in public health contexts.