Flames Engulf CDC; Agency Blames Fire Alarm

Guest Post by Jenna McCarthy

(It’s an analogy, but it works.)

In this week’s episode of Why Liberals Are Demanding RFK Jr.’s Resignation, an unhinged man went on a deadly shooting spree at CDC headquarters and naturally, the left is blaming the beleaguered HHS secretary for the chaos and carnage.

On Friday afternoon, thirty-year-old Patrick Joseph White unleashed a barrage of bullets across the agency’s Atlanta campus, terrorizing employees along with residents, students, and staff at neighboring Emory University and fatally shooting a police officer. White also died at the scene, although it’s unclear whether he took his own life or was killed by returning gunfire.

In fact, many details of the attack are still murky—including the timeline, trigger, and precisely how security at a highly funded federal health fortress failed—but according to the media, here’s what we apparently know beyond a shadow of a doubt:

1. A guy shot up some stuff.
2. It’s Bobby Kennedy’s fault.

“Authorities have not confirmed a motive,” CNN wrote, “but sources told CNN the shooter may have targeted the CDC over personal health concerns he blamed on the Covid-19 vaccine.”

Sources told CNN. May have targeted. Blah blah blah vaccine. Obviously: Kennedy’s (and ergo, Trump’s) fault. Cue the lynch mob.

“Investigators say that the man who opened fire on the headquarters of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, killing a police officer, may have been opposed to Covid vaccinations,” is how the BBC opened their coverage. (He may also have been opposed to cargo shorts, synchronized swimming, and fondue; he’s unalive so we’ll never know.)

According to the AP, the shooter’s father told law enforcement that White “blamed the Covid-19 vaccine for making him depressed and suicidal.”

Not even a single curious so-called journalist: “Hey, I wonder if that’s even a thing. Maybe I should google that.”

Jenna: “It totally is and it took me point-seven seconds to find you this proof.”

The New York Times is no longer bothering to source their claims or waste even a droplet of ink on substantiation:

“Law enforcement officials said that Patrick Joseph White, a 30-year-old from the suburbs of Atlanta, opened fire on the complex of buildings on Friday afternoon,” they wrote. “He had become fixated with the coronavirus vaccine, believing that it was the cause of his own physical ailments, officials said, and he attacked the institution that has been at the center of rampant conspiracy theories and misinformation about the federal government’s response to the pandemic.”

Do you see how the original architects of CORRELATION DOES NOT EQUAL CAUSATION suddenly forgot their own mantra? He was fixated and he attacked. Did he attack because he was fixated? Nobody knows. Today I was hungry and my cat puked on my couch. I blame Julia Child.

The shooter’s father also reportedly warned police months ago about his son’s mental instability. He warned police. That’s not run-of-the-mill parental concern; that’s ‘oh crap, I think my kid’s about to do something illegal.’ But rather than focus on the shooter’s psychiatric unraveling or the lack of law enforcement response or the agency’s deplorable track record or even the documented links between Covid vaccination and psychosis (which appears to increase with each booster), the chorus launched into its one and only hit single: “This is on Kennedy.”

The union representing CDC employees wasted no time declaring that Kennedy’s “continuous lies about science and vaccine safety” had “fueled a climate of hostility.” Others accused him outright of paving the way for the attack—because nothing says “objective analysis” like pinning a lone gunman’s actions on the whistleblower who’s been calling out the CDC’s corruption for decades.

“This shooting was the ‘physical embodiment of the narrative that has taken over, attacking science, and attacking our federal workers,’” NBC News quoted Sarah Boim, a former CDC communications staffer who was fired this year* during Trump administration terminations.

[*Pro journalism tip: When you need a scathing quote for your story, scorned former employees never disappoint.]

So… Kennedy has called for transparency, gold-standard science, and an end to bureaucratic bloating. His ‘narrative’ is that health regulators should back claims with real data, admit when they’re wrong (and then promptly course-correct), and stop hiding negative outcomes, conflicts of interest, and statistical manipulations. If that’s an assault, the real victim here is common sense.

Where are the whispers of mental health systems failing a desperate man or a public health agency plagued by accusations of criminality and distrust? Buried under criticism for the man trying to unzip the political body bag, of course. Somehow, incredibly, no one is suggesting that maybe—just maybe—the agency greenlighting dangerous, under-tested products with reckless abandon could have played a role in this person’s psychotic spiral. Nope. In this script, the villain is the single voice saying, “We should probably stop pretending everything’s fine”—not the institution that has been caught lying about everything from mercury in vaccines to the flu shot’s negative efficacy.

Imagine blaming the fire alarm for the fire.

That’s basically what’s happening here. RFK Jr. has been shouting for years that the building’s full of oily rags, faulty wires, leaky gas lines, and a guy in the corner chain-smoking near a pile of fireworks—and instead of inspecting the premises, the press is now writing breathless headlines about how his “alarmist rhetoric” is the real problem. It would be like accusing Paul Revere of starting the Revolutionary War because he had the audacity to ride through town bellowing, “The British are coming!”

The display of cognitive dissonance online is both disheartening and alarming… albeit not at all surprising. After all, we’ve been conditioned to treat politics like a team sport—where the jersey someone’s wearing tells us everything we think we need to know, and anything the ‘other side’ says is clearly rooted in either evil or idiocy.

Which brings us to the present conundrum. We’ve officially entered an era where it’s routine—not to mention socially and politically safer—to attack the guy pointing out the iceberg than to question the captain who’s steering straight toward it. The CDC could be auctioning off lifeboats as the ship takes on water, and the news would still scream, “Passenger Jeopardizes Safety.”

And so the narrative sails on—no map, no compass, and certainly no lifeboat drill—because admitting the CDC’s track record might make someone crack would mean asking awkward questions about the ship’s safety. Easier to point at the nearest pirate, stick a “dangerous rhetoric” sticker on his hat, and get back to rearranging the deck chairs.

It’s a tidy little playbook: protect the institution at all costs, pretend accountability is a conspiracy theory, and hope no one notices the hull is riddled with holes. In that sense, Kennedy’s greatest “crime” isn’t what he’s said—it’s that he’s made it harder for them to sell the illusion that the ship is seaworthy.