After the CDC shooting, federal workers demand more protections from RFK Jr. : Shots

In the aftermath of an attack on the main campus for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta on Aug. 8, employees at the CDC, National Institutes of Health, and other health agencies are calling for support and leadership from their boss, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

A letter signed by hundreds of current and former HHS employees, addressed to Kennedy and members of Congress, says Kennedy is “complicit in dismantling America’s public health infrastructure and endangering the nation’s health” by questioning the integrity of the CDC’s workforce, making false claims that COVID vaccines are not safe or effective, changing vaccine policy based on ideology rather than science, and contributing to “harassment and violence experienced by the CDC staff.”

To the signatories, these factors contributed to an attack on CDC on August 8, when a gunman stood on a street corner in Atlanta and fired more than 500 rounds onto the agency’s main campus. Authorities have said that the shooting was motivated by the gunman’s “discontent” with COVID vaccines, based on written documents found in his home. He thought he had been injured by the vaccine and believed it was harming others, according to interviews with family members by Atlanta News First.

In response to the letter, HHS emailed a statement to NPR on August 20:

“Secretary Kennedy is standing firmly with CDC employees—both on the ground and across every center—ensuring their safety and well-being remain a top priority…Any attempt to conflate widely supported public health reforms with the violence of a suicidal mass shooter is an attempt to politicize a tragedy.”

“This is a major event”

The gunman approached CDC main campus on a Friday afternoon, towards the end of the work day. He struck six buildings in which CDC employees barricaded themselves in offices, hid in closets and crouched under desks. The gunman killed a responding police officer, 33-year-old David Rose, and then killed himself.

“This is a major event,” said Dr. Fiona Havers, a former CDC official and a signatory on the letter who left the agency in June. “It’s critical that the scale of this event is recognized and that people that work in public health, and public health in general, are given much more support than they’re being given right now.”

Days after the shooting, Dr. Elizabeth Soda, an infectious diseases physician with the CDC’s National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, returned to campus to retrieve her laptop. “I never dreamed I’d see CDC in that state, never dreamed I’d see bullet holes,” she says, speaking in her personal capacity, and not on behalf of the agency.

Soda had left campus just 30 minutes before the shooting happened, and was texting frantically with colleagues during the attack. “Initially, I was shocked,” she says, “but now that I’ve sat and thought about it, it’s not surprising.” She says that years of inaccurate health information being spread, along with the politicization of science and health, have created the conditions for violence to be directed at public health workers.

Those factors have ratcheted up in the past few months, Havers says. “The fact that the inflammatory rhetoric and misinformation about COVID vaccines is now coming from the HHS Secretary and from the administration has fueled it and given it legitimacy it may not have had before,” she says.

CDC employees say Secretary Kennedy’s response to the shooting has been lacking. He visited Atlanta to tour the campus in the days after, meeting with the CDC director and security staff, and visiting the wife of the police officer who was killed.

The statement from HHS in response to the letter said, “In the wake of this heartbreaking shooting, [Kennedy] traveled to Atlanta to offer his support and reaffirm his deep respect, calling the CDC ‘a shining star among global health agencies.’ For the first time in its 70-year history, the mission of HHS is truly resonating with the American people—driven by President Trump and Secretary Kennedy’s bold commitment to Make America Healthy Again.”

But noticeably absent, staffers say, has been any mention of the misinformation on COVID vaccines that authorities said motivated the shooter, or a full defense of the CDC’s mission and work. In an interview with Scripps News days after the attack, Kennedy said that government officials were “saying things that were not always true” in an effort to “persuade the public to get vaccinated” during the COVID pandemic. “Public health agencies have not been honest,” he said. Kennedy also said that public health authorities should not be trusted, because “trusting the experts is not a feature of science or democracy, it’s a feature of totalitarianism and of religion.”

The signatories of the letter have asked Kennedy to “stop spreading inaccurate health information,” “affirm CDC’s scientific integrity,” and guarantee the safety of the HHS workforce.

Solidarity

The attack on CDC has rallied support from employees at other HHS agencies, hundreds of whom signed onto the letter as well.

“Even though this attack happened at the CDC in Georgia, this affects all federal workers,” says Ian Morgan, a postdoctoral fellow at National Institutes of Health and a signatory on the letter, speaking for himself and not for the agency. “We’re standing in solidarity with our CDC colleagues, but we know we are also at risk.”

Morgan says that security and police presence has increased at the NIH campus in Maryland, “and that’s great,” he says, “but when you have people from the top who are putting a target on your back, how can you feel safe going to work every day?”

He says a number of changes in the past few months have “put the lives of the American people at risk,” including leadership that spreads inaccurate claims about vaccines, barriers to purchasing supplies and communicating with the public, major reductions to staff and programs. “Our jobs as federal workers are to improve the health of the American people, but we’re being kept from doing that,” Morgan says.

The letter writers have asked for a response from Kennedy by September 2.