CDC Staffers Saw the Violence Coming
10th August 2025
The Atlantic, a Voice of the Crust.
When gunfire pelted the Atlanta-based headquarters of the CDC yesterday, hundreds of employees were inside the campus’s buildings. The experience was terrifying. But some of the employees were not particularly shocked. “I’m actually surprised it didn’t happen sooner,” a nearly 20-year veteran of the agency told me. (She, like others I spoke with for this article, requested anonymity out of fear of losing her job.)
I, too, am not surprised it didn’t happen sooner–like, in 2020.
This was, in one sense, the first attack of its kind on the CDC. The shooter, whom law-enforcment 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.
Guess the wouldn’t take the hint.
In another sense, public-health workers have been facing escalating hostility since the early days of the 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.
Oh, wow: You lie about there being a pandemic, you push politicians into sending the economy into a death spiral, you lie to people about the effectiveness of masks, you push politicians into mandating experimental vaccines that actually kill people, and you’re surprised that somebody might decide to resort to violence? Clueless in Atlanta….