The day after a lone gunman opened fire on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, killing a police officer and shattering windows across the agency’s campus, employees were reeling from shock, fear and rage.
“We’re mad this has happened,” Dr. Debra Houry, the CDC’s chief medical officer, said in a large group call Saturday morning with Susan Monarez, the agency’s newly confirmed director, who tried to reassure them. Another employee on the call, a recording of which was obtained by The New York Times, asked Monarez: “Are you able to speak to the misinformation, the disinformation that caused this issue? And what your plan forward is to ensure this doesn’t happen again?”
The investigation into the shooting and the gunman’s potential motives was still in early stages Saturday. But law enforcement officials said that the suspect identified in the shooting had become fixated with the coronavirus vaccine, believing that it was the cause of his physical ailments.
Inside the CDC, the shooting was viewed as part of a pattern in which health workers have been targets of political, verbal and physical assaults on them and their workplaces.
Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, the director of the CDC’s respiratory diseases division, told Monarez on the call that employees wanted to see a plan for their safety and an acknowledgment that the attack was not just “a shooting that just happened across the street with some stray bullets.”
Daskalakis was not in his office when its windows were pierced by one of the gunman’s bullets.
Many Americans, and even some top federal health officials in the Trump administration, have blamed the CDC for lockdowns, school closings and vaccine mandates, even when some of those decisions were made by state and local governments, or businesses.
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“I am heartbroken, angry and somehow not surprised,” said Dr. Anne Zink, a former president of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials who served as Alaska’s chief medical officer until last year.
Threats against her have increased even though she is no longer a government official, she said.
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The Times spoke with or texted a dozen CDC scientists Saturday, who discussed the shooting on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. They described being terrified as bullets shattered the glass windows, and some recounted the chilling sight of casings littered in front of the CDC.
In interviews, the employees conveyed sadness about the police officer who had died trying to keep them safe, and a feeling of betrayal and devastation at being demonized while working to improve Americans’ health.
The sound of rapid gunfire started around 4:50 p.m. Friday. One scientist who evaluates COVID vaccines had just stepped out of her building to walk to her car. As she headed to pick up her infant daughter from day care, she heard shots over her right shoulder, she said. She turned around, ran back inside and called security to confirm what was happening.
“CDC SHELTER IN PLACE. GUNMAN AT EMORY POINT,” she wrote to friends and colleagues in a group chat at 4:57 p.m. (The agency sent its alert to employees at 5:13 p.m.)
The employee and three others barricaded themselves in an office, moving two loaded bookshelves against the door. She put a sticky note over the motion sensor for the light switch and laid flat on the floor for hours, before a SWAT team arrived to clear the floor.
She finally made it home to her husband and two young children around midnight. In a text message sent at 3:11 a.m., she said she was still awake, too traumatized to sleep.
At least four buildings were damaged by bullets, Monarez said in a statement Friday night. Photos shared by workers revealed glass windows shattered by bullet holes. One showed as many as 18 bullet holes in a single building.
One of the buildings included a containment lab of the highest biosecurity level, but under tight security and with reinforced walls. It was not hit in the attack. The CDC studies some of the most dangerous pathogens in the world, including Ebola and Marburg viruses and the bacteria that cause anthrax.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who oversees the CDC, did not make a statement Friday. Late Saturday morning, more than 30 minutes after posting photos of himself fishing on social media, Kennedy posted condolences on his official X account and pledged to support CDC employees.
In an email sent later in the day to the entire Department of Health and Human Services, including the CDC, Kennedy wrote: “This is a reminder of the very human challenges public servants sometimes face — even in places dedicated to healing and progress. But it also reinforces the importance of the work you do every day.”
On the Saturday morning CDC call, an employee asked Monarez twice if she had spoken to Kennedy. Both times, Monarez replied that she had been in touch with the “office of the secretary.”
Kennedy has previously called the CDC a “cesspool of corruption” and a fascist enterprise. He has accused the agency’s scientists of ignoring vaccine harms to children, comparing it to the Catholic Church’s cover-up of child sex abuse. He has also disparaged the COVID-19 vaccine, calling it the “deadliest” vaccine ever made.
Some scientists said the attack was an extreme example of the violence many health workers have experienced since the pandemic began.
“The intersection of disinformation, conspiracy theories and political violence is getting scarier by the day,” said Dr. Celine Gounder, an infectious disease specialist at Bellevue Hospital Center. “I’m very worried about how this is now going beyond defunding of infectious diseases and public health to political violence against the people working in those fields,” she said.
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Nearly 9,000 employees and contractors work at the campus where the shooting took place, but it is unclear how many might have been absent because of off-site work and vacations, or because they had just left the office.
Dr. Fiona Havers, who resigned from her position as a senior CDC adviser on vaccine policy earlier this year, was on lockdown at Emory University Hospital while visiting a colleague. She heard the sirens, and stayed in close contact with her friends and former colleagues, including in a 900-person chat group where CDC employees shared terrifying details of the shooting.
“I am feeling very angry and very sad for my colleagues that are still at CDC,” said Havers, who quit after Kennedy fired all 17 members of a committee that makes recommendations on which shots Americans should take and when.
“This was a major attack on a federal facility,” she said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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