Today's Edition
ATLANTA (NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE)
A gunman who believed the coronavirus vaccine was to blame for his ailments opened fire Friday outside of the headquarters of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, killing a police officer and striking the exteriors of several buildings on the CDC campus, law enforcement officials said.
The gunman was found fatally shot, but no civilians were hit by gunfire, officials said.
Officials reported an active shooter just before 5pm local time at a CVS drugstore on Clifton Road, which is directly across from the main entrance to the CDC headquarters. Officers found the gunman on the second floor of the CVS, but it was unclear if he had been struck in an exchange of gunfire with the police or if the gunshot was self-inflicted, Chief Darin Schierbaum of the Atlanta Police Department said at a news conference Friday evening.
Schierbaum said that investigators believed there was a single gunman, whose identity has not been released.
The man appeared to have had a long-brewing fixation about the vaccine, according to a senior law enforcement official who spoke anonymously to discuss an ongoing investigation. The official added that the man believed that the shot had been the cause of his physical illness. The man’s father had reported him to authorities earlier Friday, saying that he was suicidal.
Officer David Rose of the DeKalb County Police Department was one of the first officers to arrive and was killed, officials said.
Rose, 33, had two children, and his wife is pregnant with a third. He was just a few weeks from his first anniversary with the department. He had graduated from training in March and had served in the US Marines before becoming an officer.
The shooting comes as the COVID vaccine - an achievement that curbed the spread of a deadly global pandemic but also became the subject of rampant conspiracy theories and intense political divisions - has faced renewed skepticism since Robert F. Kennedy Jr. became health and human services secretary.
Kennedy has raised doubts about many routine immunisations and has been particularly critical of the COVID vaccinations. This week, he cancelled nearly $500 million in grants and contracts for work on mRNA vaccines, the technology that helped turn the tide against the coronavirus.
The CDC is an institution at the core of Atlanta’s identity, with the city regarded as a capital of public health and research in large part because of the federal agency’s roots. The headquarters are in the northeast corner of the city, adjacent to the main campus of Emory University and Emory University Hospital.
The CVS store is in a complex with restaurants and apartments that is home to medical students and public health workers.
