On the afternoon of August 8, 2025, a man who believed the COVID-19 vaccine had ruined his health fired more than 180 rounds at the headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, shattering roughly 150 windows across several buildings, some of them blast-resistant. No CDC employee was physically wounded. DeKalb County Police Officer David Rose, 33, a former Marine and a father of three, was killed responding to the attack. The gunman died as well.

This week, on the anniversary, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is visiting the CDC to honor Officer Rose, with a new plaque at his memorial and a stretch of road to be renamed in his name. A year later, many of the people who work inside those repaired windows say they still feel like targets. The anniversary is a fitting moment to name plainly what happened to public health that day, and what has kept happening since, because the most important damage was not to the glass.

The danger inverted

The clearest account of it comes from Daniel Jernigan, the former director of the CDC center for emerging and zoonotic infectious diseases, who was in his office when the shooting began. His colleagues, he has written, are people who suit up to handle lethal pathogens in high-containment laboratories, who have worked through Ebola outbreaks in the forests of West Africa. And yet, for a few hours that afternoon, it was more dangerous for them to sit at a desk in Atlanta than to chase a hemorrhagic fever in the field.

That inversion is the heart of the matter. Public health workers accept the dangers of disease as part of the job; facing down pathogens in service of the public is what they signed up for. What arrived instead came not from a virus but from a member of the public they exist to protect, acting on a false belief about their work. The threat to these workers has shifted from the diseases they fight toward the hostility of some of the people they serve, and that is a fundamentally different kind of threat, because a pathogen is indifferent, while hostility is aimed.

Why hostility is a different kind of danger

A virus does not care whether you trust it, and it cannot be reasoned with or inflamed. Hostility can, and it is corrosive in a way disease is not, because it attacks something a pathogen never touches: the relationship between public health and the public. That relationship is not a nicety layered on top of the real work. It is the mechanism itself.

Public health, almost uniquely among government functions, has no coercive power to speak of. It cannot force anyone to be vaccinated, to heed a warning, or to cooperate with an investigation. It works entirely through trust and voluntary cooperation, through people choosing to act on guidance because they believe the people giving it are competent and acting in good faith. When misinformation and animosity erode that trust, and when the erosion hardens into intimidation and violence, the harm is not only to the workers who are frightened. It is to the entire apparatus by which public health keeps everyone safe, because that apparatus runs on the very trust being destroyed.

An attack on something everyone depends on

This is why the threats matter far beyond the CDC's campus, and why they should concern even those who have lost faith in the agency. A public health system whose workers are afraid to come to work, whose ranks are thinning, and whose guidance a large share of the country no longer believes is a system that cannot do its job when it is next needed. And it will be needed. The measles cases circulating now, the foodborne outbreaks, the next novel virus that has not yet announced itself, all of them will demand exactly the staffed, functioning, trusted public health capacity that intimidation and attrition wear away.

The hard truth embedded here is that undermining public health harms even the people doing the undermining, because disease does not respect anyone's politics. The next pathogen will not pause to ask who trusted the CDC. When it comes, a hollowed-out and demoralized public health workforce will protect the skeptic and the believer alike, or fail to protect either, and the capacity to do that protecting is being spent down now, in advance, one threat and one departure at a time.

The shooting sat atop a stack of strains

The attack was the most visceral blow, but it landed on an institution already under multiple simultaneous pressures, which Jernigan lays out and which are worth stating as the reported facts they are. The CDC workforce has lost around a quarter of its staff to firings, retirements, and departures. The administration has proposed budget cuts of about 40% to the agency for 2027, though Congress will ultimately determine what is enacted. And the vaccine advisory process has been reshaped in ways that move it outside the normal channels of evidence review.

Those developments are the subject of genuine political dispute, and it is not the place of this piece to adjudicate whether each is wise or harmful; reasonable people disagree, and the administration defends its health agenda in terms very different from its critics'. The narrow, factual point is simply that the workforce absorbed the trauma of an armed attack while simultaneously absorbing these other strains, and that the combination has left many who remain feeling both unsafe and unsupported.

The misinformation, and the consensus it defies

The belief that drove the gunman, that COVID-19 vaccines had caused his physical suffering, is contradicted by the scientific consensus that those vaccines are safe and effective. That consensus is not a matter of opinion or allegiance, and stating it is not a political act. Public health leaders across the ideological spectrum have warned that vaccine misinformation carries real and rising costs. A former U.S. surgeon general who served in the first Trump administration described the shooting as not an isolated event but a reflection of escalating threats to public health workers in a climate shaped by misinformation and inflammatory rhetoric, and the union representing CDC employees called on health officials to condemn the falsehoods that surrounded the attack. One can hold those observations, about the facts of vaccine safety and the documented rise in threats, without endorsing any particular claim about which individuals bear responsibility for the broader climate.

The one thing that should not be political

Here care is owed in both directions, because the anniversary itself has been pulled into the divide. Many CDC staff feel unsafe and undermined, regard the Secretary's visit as too little, too late, note that the President never issued condolences after the shooting, and some intend to protest. The administration, for its part, says it is honoring Officer Rose and that its agenda is pro-safety, pro-transparency, and pro-accountability rather than anti-vaccine. These are contested matters, and where a person lands on them will track their broader politics; this piece takes no side among them.

But beneath all of it lies a proposition that ought not to be contested at all: that violence against public health workers is wrong, and that people who serve the entire public deserve to be safe at their desks. A federal employees' union said it, and so did a Republican former surgeon general. That this most basic affirmation, the condemnation of an armed attack on the people who fight the country's diseases, could itself become entangled in partisan feeling is perhaps the saddest measure of how far the ground has shifted.

The deepest damage done on August 8, 2025, was not the 150 shattered windows, which have been replaced, nor even, in the narrowest sense, the loss of a single afternoon's safety, terrible as that was. It was what the attack, and the long year since, signaled to the people who protect all of us: that doing this work can make you a target, and that the trust their work depends on is fraying badly. Officer Rose's memory, and a workforce that still suits up against outbreaks while now also flinching at the public it serves, deserve more than a plaque and a renamed road. They deserve a recommitment to something that sits upstream of every policy fight, that protecting public health is not a partisan act, and that a society willing to let its disease-fighters be intimidated has already surrendered something it will need desperately when the next outbreak arrives, whether or not it believes that today.

Primary sources

  1. STAT, in a first-person essay by Daniel Jernigan, former director of the CDC's National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, for his account of being in the building during the shooting, the observation that it was briefly more dangerous to sit at a CDC desk in Atlanta than to chase a hemorrhagic fever in the field, and the description of the CDC's current pressures, including a roughly 25% loss of staff, proposed presidential budget cuts of about 40% for 2027, and a vaccine advisory process moved outside normal evidence-review channels.
  2. WSB-TV for Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s anniversary visit and the ceremony honoring Officer David Rose with a new plaque and a road renaming, and for details of the August 8, 2025 attack.
  3. CNN for CDC workers saying they still feel targeted a year later, the concerns of staff who work on vaccines, the absence of a presidential statement of condolence, the planned fireside chat with NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, and the "Fired but Fighting" protest.
  4. Fox 5 Atlanta for the roughly 180 rounds fired and 150 windows shattered, the gunman's reported physical suffering, and union concerns.
  5. CIDRAP for the gunman's belief that the COVID-19 vaccine harmed him, the American Federation of Government Employees' call to condemn vaccine misinformation, and former Surgeon General Jerome Adams's statements.
  6. The Associated Press for the framing of the shooting within a broader pattern of hostility toward health workers and for the HHS statement that Secretary Kennedy's agenda is pro-safety, pro-transparency, and pro-accountability. Officer David Rose was 33, a former Marine, and a father of three.