Staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in Atlanta are reeling from a deadly shooting that unfolded Friday evening.
The shooting left one local police officer dead, at least four agency buildings riddled with bullet holes, and terrified staffers feeling like "sitting ducks." Fortunately, no CDC staff or civilians were injured. But, it quickly drew a spotlight to US health secretary and zealous anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who critics accused of fueling the violence with his menacing and reckless anti-vaccine rhetoric.
Kennedy publicly responded to the shooting on social media at about 11 am Eastern Time on Saturday, roughly 18 hours after the event. Former US Surgeon General Jerome Adams subsequently slammed Kennedy's delayed response as "tepid" in a critical essay published in Stat. The news outlet separately pointed out that Kennedy had posted on his personal social media account about 30 minutes prior to his response to the shooting, in which he shared pictures of a fishing trip.
“Very unsettled”
While an official motive for the shooting has not been released, media reporting so far points to anti-vaccine disinformation playing a role. The suspected shooter was identified as Patrick Joseph White, a 30-year-old who lived with his parents in Kennesaw, Georgia, about 30 miles northeast of Atlanta. White was fatally shot during the attack, but it remains unclear if he died from a self-inflicted wound or was shot by law enforcement.
Over the weekend, CDC officials told staff that the shooting was targeted at the CDC. And an unnamed law enforcement official told the Associated Press that White blamed the COVID-19 vaccine for making him depressed and suicidal.
Reporting from The Atlantic-Journal Constitution supported that reporting, talking with White's neighbor, who said White thought he had been injured by a COVID-19 vaccine. While COVID-19 vaccines can cause some cases of severe side effects, those cases are extremely rare, and the shots have otherwise saved millions of lives during the height of the pandemic.
"He was very unsettled and he very deeply believed that vaccines hurt him and were hurting other people," Nancy Hoalst, who lives directly across the street from White’s family, told the AJC. "He emphatically believed that."