Open Threads

Feels like this tragic incident got overshadowed at the end of last week…

My statement on today's shooting at the CDC:

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— Senator Reverend Raphael Warnock (@warnock.senate.gov) August 8, 2025 at 11:08 PM

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CDC employees told me the shooting at CDC was much worse than initial police reports suggested. More than 40 bullets hit buildings. “It’s a miracle more people weren’t hit,” said one staffer who was locked down in a building for hours last evening.

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— Lena Sun (@lenasun.bsky.social) August 9, 2025 at 7:49 PM

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Some CDC staff say that they have long feared the day that escalating animosity toward the agency would culminate in actual violence, @landmanspeaking.bsky.social reports:

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— The Atlantic (@theatlantic.com) August 9, 2025 at 11:10 PM

Per the Atlantic, “‘I’m Actually Surprised It Didn’t Happen Sooner’” [gift link]:

… This was, in one sense, the first attack of its kind on the CDC. The shooter, whom law-enforcement officials have identified as Patrick Joseph White, a 30-year-old resident of an Atlanta suburb, was reportedly fixated on the idea that the COVID-19 vaccine had made him depressed and suicidal. No employees were injured by the bullets that entered the buildings, according to a CDC representative. But an Atlanta police officer named David Rose was shot and later died from his injuries. White, too, was found dead—fatally shot—at the scene. (It is not yet clear if his wound was self-inflicted or if he was killed by police.) When he took aim at the agency on Friday afternoon, he was near a corner where a lone man stands holding anti-vaccine signs nearly every day, several CDC staffers told me.

In another sense, public-health workers have been facing escalating hostility since the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. In 2020, armed protesters gathered on the Ohio Health Department director’s front lawn, and the chief health officer of Orange County, California, was met with death threats after issuing a mask mandate. She had to hire extra security and was eventually driven to resign. Anthony Fauci, who served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases during the country’s initial COVID response, has faced regular death threats since 2020. Nearly a third of state, local, and tribal public-health workers reported facing some sort of workplace violence in a 2021 survey.

Last year, Fauci told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that threats of violence to public-health workers correlate with verbal attacks from high-profile politicians and media personalities. “It’s like clockwork,” he said. In the second Trump administration, those attacks have become commonplace—the very selling points, even, that have helped a number of President Donald Trump’s health appointees gain their positions. In 2024, when announcing his own pick for CDC director, Trump maligned the CDC and other federal health agencies, accusing them of having “engaged in censorship, data manipulation, and misinformation.” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was already a longtime anti-vaccine activist when he took the mantle as America’s health secretary; he has compared vaccinating children to the abuses of the Catholic church. During his own 2024 presidential run, he promised to “clean up the cesspool of corruption at CDC.”…

The shooter appears to have brought five guns to the scene, and at least four federal buildings were struck by dozens of bullets overall. In the hours immediately after the shooting, while many CDC employees remained barricaded in offices and marooned in conference rooms, they heard nothing from Kennedy or Trump….

To the CDC employees I spoke with, the sluggish response is the latest episode in the administration’s escalating abandonment of the agency. Since January, the Trump administration has hit the CDC with massive layoffs, proposed halving its budget, and forced changes to internal policies governing the fundamentals of its scientific work. Earlier this year, Kennedy purged the committee that advises the CDC on vaccine recommendations. Just this week, he canceled nearly $500 million in federally funded research on mRNA vaccines—widely considered among CDC employees and public-health experts to be the greatest domestic triumph of the U.S. pandemic response—stating incorrectly that they cause more risk than benefit against the flu and COVID…

Even people who have volunteered for risky missions in their public-health work are still getting used to the idea that the danger has arrived at the home front. “I’ve put my life on the line for this agency, responding to outbreaks in some of the most dangerous parts of the world,” a 13-year veteran of the agency told me. “I didn’t expect to face the same risks at the Atlanta campus as I faced in South Sudan.”

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Domestic Terrorism Open Thread: The Shooting At the CDC (Friday)Post + Comments (128)