As the events of the last 24 hours settled in, Abigail Tighe recalled the terrifying moment a friend texted her that an active shooter was taking shots at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The news was confirmed in a panicked call to the CDC child care center, where her toddler is enrolled: “Yes, we’re locking down. Please don’t come,” Tighe said she was told.
Tighe’s next several hours were spent texting with employees in lockdown, and those working on the outside. It was well after 10 p.m. when she was finally able to get through the massive traffic jam, pick up her child and go to bed with her family intact.
Her word for it all was an expletive. In short, the former CDC employee feels targeted … again.
“I’m so angry and annoyed and frustrated,” said Tighe, who was laid off this year from a job in CDC communications. “I’ve been fired, I’ve been targeted, I’ve been villainized. And now they’re shooting at my kid’s day care.
“It is dystopian, it is unreal, and I mean I don’t know how to get folks in the U.S. who think that this is OK to understand that this isn’t how things should be. People should be able to do public service work and to care about their communities and public health and do the right thing and not be villainized.”
Like Tighe, people interviewed by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Saturday morning expressed gratitude to police and deep sorrow for the loss of an officer who was shot trying to stop the shooting.
But they also expressed feelings of grief and anger at the lack of response from the federal government overseeing the CDC, and a sense that the shooting was itself an outgrowth of the misinformation and chaos sown by the Trump administration.
It has been an agency under siege for months from cuts by President Donald Trump’s Department Of Government Efficiency, undermined by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s contrarian thoughts on science and vaccines, left vulnerable by hundreds of layoffs and little communication.
And now, a shooting.
Employees were told Friday they will work from home while security is assessed. But they were not given time off. Officials with HHS, of which the CDC is a part, referred all questions about the shooting to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
Dr. John Brooks, former chief medical officer for the CDC’s Division of HIV Prevention and for the CDC’s emergency responses to COVID-19 and mpox, said early Saturday that CDC staff have needlessly endured “deep emotional wounds … since the inauguration under the current administration.”
“Why has the White House not issued any statement?” Brooks asked. “Do they really hate CDC this much? Are they simply incapable of doing anything to support federal workers, including those that aim to reduce exactly this kind of violence against Americans?”
Issuing a statement “was a no brainer and should have been issued immediately. And yet, not even thoughts and prayers at this point.”
As expressions of support poured out from Georgia and local officials, by the time CDC employees went to bed, RFK Jr. had only reposted a social media statement from CDC Director Susan Monarez.
White House officials said nothing.
On Saturday, Kennedy posted on his personal social media account photos of himself holding a giant King salmon on a fishing trip with Alaska tribal elders. Later that morning, after the complaints started to flow, his official account posted a message of support for CDC employees, and a longer one was emailed to them directly.
“We know how deeply unsettling this is, particularly for those working in Atlanta,” the statement says. “The shock and uncertainty that follow incidents like this are real, and they affect us all in different ways. We want everyone to know, you’re not alone. Leadership is in close coordination with CDC teams to ensure support is available on the ground.”
Tighe noted the reports that Trump’s Office of Management and Budget head Russell Vought said the administration planned to “put (federal employees) in trauma.”
“They’re responsible for this,” she said. “They have been sowing so much hatred for CDC, for civil servants, that it is not surprising that someone would be emboldened to attack the CDC at all.”
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