The CDC Shooter Wasn't Misinformed Into Murder

The CDC under fire and the perils of simple explanations.

On Friday afternoon, Patrick Joseph White, a 30-year-old man from Kennesaw, Georgia, arrived at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta with five firearms in his possession. He fired nearly 500 rounds at the sprawling complex, shattering 150 windows across four buildings where thousands of scientists work on disease research. He killed DeKalb County Police Officer David Rose, a 33-year-old Marine veteran who had graduated from the police academy just five months earlier. White died at the scene by his own hand, it was reported yesterday, his fury spent against glass, concrete, and a human life.

Patrick Joseph White believed, with the fervor that only the deeply wounded can muster, that the COVID-19 vaccine had made him suicidal. This belief was a kind of virus of its own, until its eradication became impossible, so he instead carried guns to the place where such vaccines are studied.

The temptation, in moments like these, is to draw straight lines between cause and effect, to say that misinformation kills as surely as bullets do. This is indeed what CDC-affiliated employees have been saying, an anonymous official telling the Washington Post, “There is a direct line from the vilification of CDC during COVID and the deliberate lies and mis/disinformation that continues today.” Another former official told NPR, “The responsibility for this lies not just with the shooter but those who have been spreading disinformation and misinformation against public health.”

It is true that the ecosystem of doubt that surrounds vaccines, climate science, and even the shape of the earth can create a kind of intellectual pollution that can, in certain damaged minds, crystallize into violence. But the connection is not quite so direct as we might wish—more like a disease whose pathways would confound even a CDC epidemiologist. And as each of us plays epidemiologist to the outbreak of violence, we yearn for discernible explanations for each action when, in fact, the true explanation might be as unsatisfying as “random act of madness.”

Blaming “misinformation” is particularly unfounded because misinformation is simply incorrect information. In fact, the CDC itself, along with the broader public health establishment, provided plenty of misinformation during the pandemic. Consider these statements from the highest levels of government:

Biden's July 2021 CNN Town Hall
Statement: "You're not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations."

CDC Director Rochelle Walensky — March 2021 MSNBC Interview
Statement: "Vaccinated people do not carry the virus."

Anthony Fauci — May 2021 CBS Interview
Statement: "When you get vaccinated…you become a dead end to the virus."

The CDC, or at least the broader public health community, and often specifically the CDC, also got wrong:

• Six-foot distancing rule

• Transmission via surfaces ("fomites")

• Outdoor transmission risk

• Emphasis on droplet transmission—evidence for airborne transmission (tiny aerosols lingering in the air) emerged by spring/summer 2020, but CDC guidance lagged. The agency only explicitly acknowledged aerosols as a significant route in late 2020 and updated technical guidance in 2021, well after many scientists had been urging the change. This was the subject of my interview with Carl Zimmer, author of Airborne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe.

The information put out was sometimes incorrect, but that doesn't mean you shoot anyone over it. Misinformation doesn’t cause murder. If we convince ourselves it does, we open ourselves up to panicked censorship and a doomed-to-fail effort to perfectly referee facts or else PEOPLE WILL DIE.

During the pandemic, the CDC became not merely a source of guidance but a symbol, either of miraculous innovation and thoughtful counsel or oppression, depending on your particular corner of America. The scientists who worked there found themselves cast as either heroes or villains in a drama they never auditioned for.

White, by all accounts, was not a political animal but a wounded one. His neighbors describe a man undone not by ideology but by pain—convinced that medicine had betrayed him, that his very body had become evidence of institutional malice. This is the particular tragedy of our moment: that expertise, which was once seen as a refuge from suffering, has for some become its apparent cause.

The French have a phrase—la rage de dents—the rage of teeth, meaning the specific fury that comes from a toothache. It captures something about how private pain can transform into public violence. Assassins from Charles J. Guiteau to Leon Czolgosz to Mark David Chapman all complained of head pains, ranging from aches to sharp daggers. White's rage was not really about vaccines or the CDC; it was about the unbearable feeling that no one believed his suffering, that the same institutions meant to heal had somehow made him sick.

And so we return to the question of responsibility. Russell Vought, now holding power as a Trump cabinet-level official, spoke openly of wanting federal workers to feel "trauma" in 2023:

We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want to put them in trauma.

Vought did not put a gun in White's hands, or necessarily a thought in anyone's head. But I do have to say, if Vought takes a little heat or feels a little trauma, it wouldn't be an unfathomable injustice. But it’s also ridiculous to suggest that my criticizing him makes me responsible for anything someone else might do.

To be clear, when it comes to the CDC shooting, Vought's words only amount to "responsibility" in the most expansive sense, the kind a moral philosopher or theologian might invoke when speaking of universal interconnectedness, not the kind that defines legal culpability or moral imperatives. The responsibility belongs, finally and forever, to the man who pulled the trigger.

The CDC will replace its windows, as institutions do. The scientists will return to their labs, perhaps with new security measures, perhaps with new fears. The great machine of expertise will grind on, because it must. But they will do so knowing that they have been placed in the literal crosshairs of those who count them as enemies, not allies, in the struggle to alleviate suffering. We will have lost, too, even more of the distinction between criticism and ammunition. Impassioned critique, which should be the very force that improves institutions, now risks being retroactively branded as "mis/disinformation"—or worse, treated as the moral equivalent of loading a gun.