Gunman in deadly CDC shooting fixated on COVID vaccine, officials say
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 2 days ago
- 6 min read
By Rick Rojas, Sean Keenan, Apoorva Mandavilli, Glenn Thrush and Christina Morales
The shimmering low-rise metal and glass towers at the headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta were pocked with dozens of bullet holes. Cracks streaked windows. Shell casings littered a sidewalk across the street.
Law enforcement officials said that Patrick Joseph White, a 30-year-old from the suburbs of Atlanta, opened fire on the complex of buildings Friday afternoon. He had become fixated with the coronavirus vaccine, believing that it was the cause of his own physical ailments, officials said, and he attacked the institution that has been at the center of rampant conspiracy theories and misinformation about the federal government’s response to the pandemic.
White was found fatally shot, although it was unclear if he had been killed in an exchange of gunfire with police or it was self-inflicted, police officials said. An officer from the DeKalb County Police Department — a rookie not even a year into the job — was killed.
Investigators on Saturday were piecing together White’s history, trying to understand what precipitated the spray of gunfire.
Five guns were recovered at the scene, according to a preliminary internal report on the investigation from the Justice Department. Four of the weapons were long guns, and at least one of the weapons was equipped with a scope, according to the report, which was reviewed by The New York Times. Law enforcement officials said that his father had called authorities earlier Friday, saying that he was suicidal.
CDC officials told staff members Saturday that investigators had found that White was “very disturbed” and had reached out in recent weeks for mental health assistance, according to a recording of an all-hands call reviewed by the Times. But there had been no threats made to the CDC that could have signaled the attack, the officials said.
In a message to CDC employees sent Friday night, Susan Monarez, who was confirmed last month as the agency’s director, said the shooting has “understandably brought fear, anger and worry to all of us.”
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. also acknowledged “how shaken our public health colleagues feel today” in a statement Saturday morning.
CDC offices across the country will be closed through Monday, according to an email from the security team at the agency addressed to staff members Saturday. The team advised employees to work remotely until the buildings reopen and to remove CDC stickers and decals from their vehicles as a precaution.
Officials reported an active shooter just before 5 p.m. Friday at a CVS drugstore on Clifton Road, which is directly across from the main entrance to the CDC headquarters. Officers found the gunman on the second floor of the CVS. At least four buildings on the CDC campus were struck by gunfire. One photograph shared by an employee showed one of the buildings had at least 18 bullet holes.
Some, if not all, of the guns were owned by White’s father, Kenneth White, who had legally obtained them, according to the Justice Department report. When approached by a reporter outside the home where Patrick White lived with his father, Kenneth White declined to comment.
The officer who was killed, David Rose of the DeKalb County Police Department, was one of the first to respond to the shooting. Rose, 33, had just finished his training in March, after serving in the Marines and trying out a couple of other fields before joining the police force.
“He’s always been a go-getter,” his mother, Deveane Atkinson, said in an interview. “He’s always been the person that wanted to help someone, always so even-tempered.”
He is also survived by his wife, their 1-year-old son and his 6-year-old daughter from a previous relationship. His wife is expecting another child.
Rose was born in Massachusetts and moved to Georgia as a boy with his mother, who worked as a nurse at Emory University Hospital, which is less than a mile from where Rose was shot. That’s where he was taken after the attack.
Beverley Rose, his grandmother, described him as “very humble, respectable.” She last spoke to him in June, when she wished him a happy birthday. “You couldn’t have a better grandson,” she said.
Beverley Rose said she had worried about his safety more when he was a police officer than when he was in the Marines. “Now we have to go bury him,” she said. “He didn’t even live his life.”
The attack struck an institution that is core to Atlanta’s identity, helping transform the city into a capital of public health work. The headquarters — where the CDC has nearly 9,000 employees and contractors — are in the northeast corner of the city, adjacent to the main campus of Emory University and Emory University Hospital.
The sudden burst of violence added an unsettling new chapter to what had already been a turbulent period for the agency and its employees. The Trump administration has moved aggressively to restructure the CDC, regarded as the world’s premier public health agency, and pursued extensive layoffs of health workers that have threatened to curtail its scope and influence.
“We know that you’ve had a tough go of it for the past year,” Mayor Andre Dickens of Atlanta, a Democrat, said at a news conference Friday evening. “We stand with you.”
The creation of the coronavirus vaccines was an achievement that limited the spread of a deadly pandemic but also became the subject of rampant conspiracy theories and intense political divisions.
Kennedy has been a prominent voice raising doubts about COVID vaccinations as well as many routine immunizations. He has made provocative statements — including calling the COVID vaccine the “deadliest” ever made — that directly contradict evidence that has shown the shot to be overwhelmingly effective.
This past week, Kennedy canceled nearly $500 million in grants and contracts for work on mRNA vaccines, the technology that helped turn the tide against the coronavirus.
Critics of Kennedy argued that he also helped fuel the animosity directed at the CDC. Federal officials have blamed the agency for botching the country’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Kennedy has previously called the CDC a “cesspool of corruption” and a fascist enterprise. He accused CDC employees of covering up vaccine harms to children, comparing it with the Catholic Church’s cover-up of child sex abuse.
The shooting was “just the perfect, terrible metaphor for what public health has endured these past six months — and the past six years,” said Katelyn Jetelina, a public health expert who has worked closely with the CDC.
In his statement Saturday, Kennedy said that public health workers needed recognition and support. “No one should face violence while working to protect the health of others,” he said, adding, “Public health workers show up every day with purpose — even in moments of grief and uncertainty.”
Law enforcement officials searched the house where White lived with his parents in Kennesaw, a suburb northwest of Atlanta, some 30 miles from the CDC headquarters.
In a neighborhood of winding streets lined with trees, sprawling yards and spacious homes, White was mostly known for quietly pitching in. He helped with handiwork, mowed lawns, trimmed hedges and walked dogs — sometimes for pay, sometimes not.
But some neighbors had noticed a shift in him. Nancy Hoalst, who lives across the cul-de-sac from the Whites’ beige two-story house, said he had become “unsettled.”
“He very deeply believed that vaccines had hurt him,” Hoalst said, “and that they were hurting other people.”
His apparent obsession with anti-vaccine conspiracy theories seemed to come out of nowhere about a year ago, she said. White would launch into unrelenting monologues about it on her front porch, describing a vast and confusing conspiracy.
She would just let him talk, finding it unwise to acknowledge that she herself was vaccinated. But, she added, she “never thought he would take it out on other people.”
It was “such a belief, it was almost like faith,” Hoalst said of his obsession with the vaccine. “It was a tenet of who he was.”
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