Inside the Chaos at the C.D.C.

"A month ago, on August 8th, Dan Jernigan, a bespectacled sixty-one-year-old scientist, was the lone senior leader on the campus of the Centers for Disease Control, in Atlanta. He sat at his desk in a five-story glass-and-concrete building that contains the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, the largest of the C.D.C.'s dozen centers. Jernigan was its director. He'd been at the agency, in a variety of roles, including ones overseeing vaccine safety and influenza control, for thirty years, under five Presidents."

"A thirty-year-old Georgia man, that the COVID-19 vaccine had made him sick, had stolen guns from his father and killed a police officer, and eventually himself, after unloading some two hundred rounds at C.D.C. buildings, including Jernigan's. Along with a group of other employees, Jernigan had eventually taken cover at the center of his building's top floor. "It was me," he said, "a management official, a science-official policy person, a cleaning person, and several others kind of huddled together""

On August 8 a shooter opened fire on the Centers for Disease Control campus in Atlanta, discharging about two hundred rounds across multiple buildings. A thirty-year-old Georgia man, who believed the COVID-19 vaccine had harmed him, stole guns from his father, killed a police officer, and then killed himself. Dan Jernigan, sixty-one, director of the CDC's National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, was present and, with colleagues, sheltered on the top floor as bullets struck building glass. Employees initially mistook the noise for construction; an Emory University alert confirmed an active-shooter situation.

Read at The New Yorker