Last August, a gunman opened fire in Atlanta near the campuses of both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Emory University, killing a police officer and shooting many windows at the CDC headquarters. The suspect, who did not survive the assault, was reportedly fixated on the Covid-19 vaccine, blaming it for his health problems.

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation later told the public that the shooter fired nearly 200 rounds at the CDC headquarters, adding that authorities recovered five guns and “over 500 shell casings” from the scene.

Not surprisingly, the violence terrified CDC officials and scientists, many of whom looked to their boss, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime CDC opponent, to take their concerns seriously and stop spreading the kind of conspiratorial nonsense that leads to threats against scientists and public health researchers.

For his part, RFK Jr. did condemn the shooting in Atlanta in a short message published to social media, but the Cabinet secretary waited until a day after the violence, and he posted his statement after posting images of himself fishing. (Donald Trump, meanwhile, failed to comment altogether on the shooting that left a police officer dead.)

As difficult as this might seem to believe, the CDC’s shot-up windows still haven’t been replaced. The Associated Press reported:

The federal government has not yet replaced the bullet-pocked windows that serve as a grim reminder of an attack at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention more than seven months ago, the agency’s acting chief acknowledged Wednesday.

CDC employees asked Dr. Jay Bhattacharya about the broken windows during a staff meeting, noting that the panes were papered over. ‘We’re working on that,’ Bhattacharya said, adding that it’s a priority.

Bhattacharya, incidentally, is also the controversial director of the National Institutes of Health, and the fact that he’s ostensibly leading the NIH and the CDC simultaneously is itself an important problem.

The fact that CDC employees have been showing up for work for seven months at a headquarters with bullet-pocked windows is obviously ridiculous, but there’s also metaphorical significance to this: The delayed repairs reflect an agency in crisis.

Indeed, a few days after Bhattacharya acknowledged the broken windows at the CDC, The New York Times Magazine published a brutal and detailed report on conditions inside the agency, based on interviews with dozens of current and former officials. It painted a picture of a hollowed-out CDC in which “agency scientists are being sidelined, political appointees are taking charge and a vital public health institution is being remade into a vehicle for ideologues.”

To be sure, the problems are not altogether new. Last fall, nine former CDC chiefs, including Anne Schuchat, who served as an acting director during Trump’s first term, linked arms and wrote a joint op-ed, in which they characterized Kennedy’s work as a dangerous public menace. (The headline said, “We Ran the C.D.C.: Kennedy Is Endangering Every American’s Health.”)

It was around this same time when it became common to see reports quoting CDC insiders referring to the agency in the past tense. The New York Times published a report with a headline and subhead that immediately generated some attention: “Will the C.D.C. Survive? Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s assault may have dealt lasting damage to the agency, experts fear, with harsh consequences for public health.”

Seven months later, existential questions about the CDC’s future remain unanswered, and the fact that bullet-pocked windows remain in place at the agency’s headquarters make it difficult to be optimistic.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

The post Whether the CDC will survive RFK Jr.’s tenure is an open question appeared first on MS NOW.

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