The newly installed director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday sought to reassure employees their mission would continue and efforts to ensure their safety would be stepped up following a gunman’s attack on the agency’s headquarters last Friday.
The message from the director, Susan Monarez, however, was delivered during an all-hands meeting that was brief and chaotic — it was expected to last one hour but closed after 13 minutes — leaving some agency employees marveling at what they saw as the inadequacy of the effort.
“This is a mess,” one wrote to STAT. The meeting began late, and technical problems reportedly prevented some people from joining the call.
Though staff were told Jim O’Neill, deputy secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, was on the call, O’Neill did not speak during the meeting. Likewise, health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — who many on staff blame for inciting anger against the agency because of his criticism of vaccines and denigration of public health workers before he took the reins at HHS — was not present.
Kennedy toured the campus on Monday, a day staff were told to work from home. He has been criticized for posting photos of a salmon fishing outing in Alaska to his personal social media account on X on Saturday, before he expressed condolences for the police officer who was killed in Friday’s attack and concern for the CDC staff on his professional X account.
A series of CDC meetings were held Monday to discuss the attack and security concerns. But the meeting on Tuesday was the first agency-wide address to the CDC by Monarez, whose first week at the CDC was punctuated by the attack. She told staff that the CDC Foundation has begun a fundraising effort for the family of the officer who was killed, David Rose of the DeKalb County Police Department.
In her brief remarks, Monarez alluded to the political debates that have made the once-storied CDC an object of hatred and distrust for some in the country, calling the incident “an attack on our community … and in many ways the very mission we serve.”
“We know that misinformation can be dangerous,” she said. “Not only to health, but those that trust us and those we want to trust. And we need to rebuild that trust together.”
“In moments like this, we must meet the challenges with rational evidence-based discourse spoken with compassion and understanding. That is how we will lead,” Monarez said.
CDC’s acting chief operating officer, Christa Capozzola, was supposed to address the meeting but was unable to do so because of technical issues.
The event did not give agency employees an opportunity to vent anger or frustrations. A CDC source told STAT the chat function on the platform used to broadcast the meeting had been disabled.
A gunman who reportedly blamed a Covid vaccination for chronic health problems fired 180 rounds of ammunition at the CDC from a pharmacy across the street. Jeff Williams, director of the CDC’s office of safety, security, and asset management, told staff the shooter struck six different buildings on the campus with at least 150 bullets, shattering windows and terrifying employees. Those employees were forced to shelter in place for hours Friday night as security swept every room on the sprawling campus to determine if the gunman was acting alone.
The gunman, who died of a self-inflicted gunshot, has been identified as Patrick Joseph White, a 30-year-old from Kennesaw, an Atlanta suburb about 25 miles northwest of CDC headquarters.
Some CDC staff have told STAT they did not receive the agency’s security alert on Friday and only learned of the incident because of a blaring siren emanating from nearby Emory University, or an email alert that Emory distributed.
In a call on Saturday with the staff of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases — the group where CDC’s vaccines research and policy is housed — a number of employees expressed concern about how the response was conducted and their general safety. One woman, fighting back tears, suggested she and her colleagues felt like “sitting ducks.”
The all-hands meeting had been scheduled before Friday’s attack and was to be an opportunity for Monarez to introduce herself and her vision for the agency to the CDC. “This is not the all-staff meeting I wanted to have,” she acknowledged as she opened her remarks.
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