A Personal Note about the Emory CDC Atlanta Shootings
The CDC shootings happened on the same day RFK Jr. slashed mRNA funding
Yesterday, I heard a volley of sirens screaming along John Lewis Freedom Parkway on their way to Midtown here in Atlanta near my home. I didn’t think much of it. I live in an urban area. Sirens scream frequently, but these included the rapidly beating strobes of police cars, which made this time different.
I noticed this batch.
An hour later, my news feed filled with stories about a shooting at nearby Emory Hospital. This made me incredibly sad, in a heart-gripping way, because it made me think about all those caregivers who rallied to a stranger’s cause in an ICU during a few difficult days not so long ago.
Some of you know that I suffered a pretty serious health setback just a day or two before the November elections, as if my body was warning me about what was to come.
Like many of you, I was prepared to dance in the streets for Kamala, simply happy to know that the road back to normalcy would remain largely uninterrupted.
It was not to be. For me, it got worse before it got worse.
The folks who helped me on that day were the amazing health practitioners at Emory. As yesterday’s news unfolded, I came to understand that the actual shootings occurred at the offices of the neighboring CDC, and Emory only suffered a scare.
Still, my final stop after my health crisis was the CVC pharmacy next to Emory, where there is now a bullet hole in the glass entryway.
I couldn’t help but think during the first news reports that the people who helped me don’t deserve to be terrorized. I thought about the nurse practitioner in my ICU who drew a heart on my whiteboard, not because she thought I was a special guy, but because, I found out later, I was considered a safe patient.
Health practitioners take a ton of abuse. I heard some of it while I was there: Patients screaming at their nurses, the people who bandage them and rescue them from critical health crises.
I did terrorize a few of them with bad dad jokes, and I’m truly sorry for that. But I loved all of them, and I think it showed.1
I’ve never been so miserable from a physical and biological standpoint in my life. But I can’t understand the anger directed towards people whose mission in life is to try to help us. The shootings freaked me out. What if one of my nurses, in the middle of her long, 12-hour shift, was hurt, or even terrified in the melee?
Information has begun to trickle in. The shooter appears to have been a man upset about COVID vaccines. Again, something designed to help us.
I long ago lost count of how many people have told me that it’s possible my stroke was caused by COVID vaccines.
Over the years, I’ve been jabbed full of the things. My health wasn’t perfect by any means, but my blood panels looked pretty good for a guy my age. I don’t drink booze or sugary drinks, I don’t suck down too much cholesterol (I’m guilty of a bit too much butter on my English muffin, though). I avoid corn syrup like it’s poison.
If I caused my health issues, it wasn’t open warfare. It would, on some level, I guess, be normal to look for outside causes.
That’s what it has come to. We’ve reached the age where we don’t trust the science that can save us. The nature of mRNA vaccines is such that, because of their specificity, they simply aren’t designed to roam our bodies looking for trouble.
So, no. As much as I’d love to blame somebody or some thing, and maybe collect a pile of money in the process (this is the motivation for many anti-vaxxers, I’m afraid), I will not reject the science that Robert Kennedy Jr. rejected when he turned off the $500 million in funding for mRNA vaccine research not more than a few hours before a man said by some to be raging against vaccines charged into the CDC officer and shot the place up, killing a DeKalb County police officer in the process, and taking him away from his family.
33-year-old sheriff’s deputy David Rose was a husband and father of two daughters. He had a son on the way. His alleged killer was identified as Patrick Joseph White, 30, of Kennesaw, Georgia, a man who, those who knew him said, listened to all the anti-vaxxers that I have shunned and have been given voice by people like the man who now runs the United States Department of Health and Human Services.
If White killed out of anti-vaccine rage, it means that anti-vaxxers killed Officer Rose. Just as RFK Jr. is about to kill millions of Americans through his childish antics and science denial.
The brain worm jokes stopped being funny when he defunded $500 million in mRNA research.
As infectious disease physician Jake Scott,says:2
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s decision to terminate $500 million in federal funding for mRNA vaccine development threatens to unravel one of medicine’s greatest recent achievements. His claim that these vaccines “fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections like Covid and flu“ represents a fundamental misunderstanding of vaccinology that could cost lives in future pandemics.
As an infectious disease physician who cared for dozens of critically ill Covid patients in December 2020, I witnessed a remarkable shift in the months that followed. As mRNA vaccines became available in early 2021, severe cases among vaccinated individuals became extremely rare. Deaths were almost exclusively among those who declined vaccination, which was tragic given how preventable these outcomes had become.
It sends a troubling message to scientists: why invest in novel platforms if political ideology can defund them despite their success?
No vaccine for respiratory viruses has ever provided complete, lasting protection against all infections. Not the flu vaccine. Not RSV vaccines. That never should have been the expectation. Some vaccines, like those for measles or polio, can effectively prevent infection and transmission, but these target fundamentally different viruses that don’t constantly mutate and reinfect the respiratory tract. The purpose of respiratory virus vaccines is to prevent severe disease, hospitalization and death. By that measure, mRNA vaccines have been revolutionary.
I need to keep quoting the expert here, because I am not one. I am only a beneficiary of his science:
The data confirms what I witnessed firsthand. According to research by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, unvaccinated individuals had 53 times the risk of death compared to those who had been fully vaccinated during the Delta wave in 2021. A New England Journal of Medicine study analyzing over 6 million Covid cases found that protection against death remained above 90% and remarkably durable, even as protection against infection declined.
The speed of mRNA vaccine development was unprecedented. We went from discovering a new virus to having an authorized vaccine in under a year, breaking the previous record of four years. Unlike traditional vaccines that require growing viruses in labs, mRNA vaccines can be designed in days once scientists have the genetic sequence.
The impact has been profound. Studies estimate Covid vaccination saved millions of lives worldwide, with estimates ranging from 2.5 million to 14.4 million. In the United States alone, the Commonwealth Fund found the vaccination program prevented 3.2 million deaths.
It bears repeating: If the CDC shooter was indeed railing about vaccines, it means that anti-vaxxers killed Officer Rose.
Now, RJK Jr. wants to kill you.
Update
According to the AP:3
Fired But Fighting, a group of laid-off CDC employees, has said HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is directly responsible for the villainization of CDC’s workforce through “his continuous lies about science and vaccine safety, which have fueled a climate of hostility and mistrust.”
Notes
You can help Officer Rose’s family by clicking here.
Thanks for reading!
Footnotes
It’s fair to say that Emory, as a teaching school, tends to lean towards young, still unjaded health practitioners, all of whom seem eager to learn and help. Nevertheless, I’m never going to yell at someone bandaging me up.
Scott, Jake. 2025. “RFK Jr. Is Attacking the Very Science That Saved Millions.” MSNBC.com. MSNBC. August 8, 2025. https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/rfk-jr-defunds-mrna-vaccine-research-covid-rcna223504.
https://apnews.com/author/susan-haigh. 2025. “Union Wants Statement against COVID Vaccine Misinformation after CDC Shooting.” AP News. August 10, 2025. https://apnews.com/article/cdc-suspect-covid-vaccine-georgia-officer-dead-0c6018d2f7caf7a2702bc09f9f3568ba.
The following link explains how mRNA vaccines work. Ironically, the linked post is via the National Institutes of Health, which is also under RFK Jr's purview. This means it may disappear, but it will always live on in the Wayback Machine (Internet archives), unless Republicans find a way to kill that, too.
https://medlineplus.gov/genetics/understanding/therapy/mrnavaccines/
Thank you for this thoughtful article!
Not to excuse bad behavior; anger is / can be a stage of grief. Folks often lash out at the closest person or thing as a reaction to loss of control over their circumstances. Health professionals understand that fact, and we try not to take it personally. Physical abuse of a caregiver, however, is never OK.