Updated @ 2:09 PM EDT on August 21, 2025
Following an Aug. 8 attack on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s main campus in Atlanta, staff at the CDC, National Institutes of Health, and other health agencies are urging their boss, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to provide them with leadership and support.
Addressing Kennedy and members of Congress, a letter signed by hundreds of current and former HHS employees claims that Kennedy is “complicit in dismantling America’s public health infrastructure and endangering the nation’s health” by casting doubt on the CDC staff’s integrity, claiming falsely that COVID vaccines are unsafe or ineffective, altering vaccine policy based on ideology rather than science, and enabling “harassment and violence experienced by the CDC staff.”
According to the signatories, these elements played a part in the August 8 attack on CDC, in which a shooter fired over 500 rounds onto the agency’s main campus while positioned on a street corner in Atlanta. Based on written documents discovered in the gunman’s residence, authorities have stated that the shooting was prompted by his “discontent” with COVID immunizations. According to family members interviewed by Atlanta News First, he felt the vaccine had hurt him and was hurting other people.
On August 20, HHS sent a comment to NPR via email in response to the letter:
Secretary Kennedy is steadfastly supporting CDC staff members on the ground and throughout all centers, guaranteeing that their security and welfare continue to be of utmost importance. It is an attempt to politicize a tragedy to equate the violence of a suicide mass shooter with popularly embraced public health initiatives.
“This is a major event”
On a Friday afternoon, as the workday was coming to an end, the shooter made his way to the CDC main campus. He targeted six CDC facilities where staff members hid in closets, huddled beneath desks, and barricaded themselves in offices. After killing 33-year-old David Rose, a responding police officer, the shooter took his own life.
Dr. Fiona Havers, a former CDC official who signed the letter and departed the organization in June, stated, “This is a major event,” “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.”
Dr. Elizabeth Soda, an infectious diseases specialist with the CDC’s National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, came back to campus a few days after the shooting to pick up her laptop. She claims, “I never dreamed I’d see CDC in that state, never dreamed I’d see bullet holes,” but not on behalf of the organization.
Just thirty minutes prior to the shooting, Soda had left campus, and during the assault, she was frantically texting coworkers. “Initially, I was shocked,” she explains, “but now that I’ve sat and thought about it, it’s not surprising.” She claims that the politics of science and health, along with years of disseminating false health information, has made it easier for violence against public health professionals to occur.
According to Havers, such forces have intensified in recent months. “The fact that the inflammatory rhetoric and misinformation about COVID vaccines is now coming from the HHS Secretary and from the administration hasfueled itand given it legitimacy it may not have had before,” she adds.
Employees at the CDC claim that Secretary Kennedy has not responded enough to the shooting. In the days that followed, he traveled to Atlanta to tour the campus, meet with the director of the CDC and security personnel, and pay a visit to the wife of the murdered police officer.
“In the wake of this tragic shooting, [Kennedy] traveled to Atlanta to offer his support and reaffirm his deep respect, calling the CDC ‘a shining star among global health agencies,'” read the statement sent by HHS in response to the letter. Due to President Trump and Secretary Kennedy’s audacious pledge to “Make America Healthy Again,” HHS’s purpose is finally connecting with the American people for the first time in its 70-year history.
Staffers point out that there hasn’t been a thorough defense of the CDC’s work and goal, nor any reference to the false information about COVID immunizations that authorities claim inspired the gunman. Kennedy claimed that government representatives were “saying things that were not always true” in an attempt to “persuade the public to get vaccinated” during the COVID outbreak in an interview with Scripps News days after the attack. “Public health agencies have not been honest,” he stated. Kennedy added that “trusting the experts is not a feature of science or democracy, it’s a feature of totalitarianism and of religion.” In other words, public health authority should not be believed.
Kennedy has been urged by the letter’s signatories to “stop spreading inaccurate health information,” “affirm CDC’s scientific integrity,” and ensure the employees of HHS are safe.
Unity
Employees at other HHS agencies have supported the CDC attack, and hundreds of them have signed the letter.
Ian Morgan, a postdoctoral scholar at the National Institutes of Health and a signatory to the letter, states, “Even though this attack happened at the CDC in Georgia, this affects all federal workers,” speaking for himself rather than the government. “We’re standing in solidarity with our CDC colleagues, but we know we are also at risk.”
“And that’s great,” Morgan says of the increased police presence and security at the NIH campus in Maryland, “but how can you feel safe going to work every day when people from the top are putting a target on your back?”
He believes that several changes in recent months have “put the lives of the American people at risk,” such as leadership that disseminates false information regarding vaccines, obstacles to acquiring supplies and interacting with the public, and significant staff and program reductions. “Our jobs as federal workers are to improve the health of the American people, but we’re being kept from doing that,” Morgan asserts.
Kennedy has been requested to respond by September 2 by the letter authors.
Copyright 2025 NPR
