Gunman attacked CDC headquarters to protest against Covid-19 vaccines
White, 30, had written about wanting to make 'the public aware of his discontent with the vaccine', Mr Hosey said.
White had also recently verbalised thoughts of suicide, which led to law enforcement being contacted several weeks before the shooting,Mr Hosey added.
He died at the scene on Friday from a self-inflicted gunshot wound after killing a police officer.
Asked about threats based on misinformation regarding the CDC and its vaccine work, FBI special agent Paul Brown said on Tuesday: 'We've not seen an uptick, although any rhetoric that suggests or leads to violence is something we take very seriously.'
'Although we are tracking it, we are sensitive to it, we have not seen that uptick,' Mr Brown, who leads the FBI's Atlanta division, said.
The suspect's family was fully co-operating with the investigation, authorities said at a news briefing on Tuesday.
White had no known criminal history, Mr Hosey added.
Executing a search warrant at the family's home in the Atlanta suburb of Kennesaw, authorities recovered written documents that were being analysed, and seized electronic devices that were undergoing a forensic examination, the agency said.
Investigators also recovered a total of five firearms, including a gun that belonged to his father that he used in the attack, Mr Hosey said.
Mr Hosey said the suspect did not have a key to the gun safe: 'He (White) broke into it.'
White had been stopped by CDC security guards before driving to a pharmacy across the street, where he opened fire from a pavement, authorities said.
The bullets pierced 'blast-resistant' windows across the campus, pinning employees down during the barrage.
More than 500 shell casings were recovered from the crime scene, the GBI said.
In the aftermath, officials at the CDC were assessing the security of the campus and notifying officials of any new threats.
US health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr toured the CDC campus on Monday, accompanied by deputy secretary Jim O'Neill and CDC director Susan Monarez, according to a health agency statement.
'No-one should face violence while working to protect the health of others,' Mr Kennedy said in a statement on Saturday.
It said top federal health officials were 'actively supporting CDC staff'.
Mr Kennedy also visited the DeKalb County Police Department, and later met privately with the wife of the officer who was killed.
A photo of the suspect would be be released later on Tuesday, Mr Hosey said, but he encouraged the public to remember the face of the officer instead.
Mr Kennedy was a leader in a national anti-vaccine movement before US president Donald Trump selected him to oversee federal health agencies, and has made false and misleading statements about the safety and effectiveness of Covid-19 jabs and other vaccines.
Some unionised CDC employees called for more protections. Meanwhile, some employees who recently left the agency as the Trump administration pursues widespread layoffs laid the blame squarely at Mr Kennedy's door.
Years of false rhetoric about vaccines and public health was bound to 'take a toll on people's mental health', and 'leads to violence', Tim Young, a CDC employee who retired in April, said.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Spectator
2 hours ago
- Spectator
The police guidance on revealing ethnicity does not go far enough
At nine minutes past eight on the evening of Monday May 26, Merseyside Police did something that no other British police force had done before. Just two hours after a car had collided with football fans celebrating Liverpool's Premier League triumph in the crowded city centre, the force proactively published the ethnicity and nationality of the man they had arrested, who had by then been taken into custody. 'We can confirm the man arrested is a 53-year-old White British man from the Liverpool area,' the police said in a press release. The force had taken this unprecedented step to avoid misinformation and disinformation about the suspect's background from fuelling unrest. It was anxious to avoid a repeat of what had happened in the aftermath of the Southport attacks ten months earlier when delays in revealing information about the suspect created a dangerous vacuum filled with rumour and fake reporting which contributed to the worst riots our country had seen for 13 years. But although Merseyside Police were widely praised for their approach following the incident in May (for which Paul Doyle has been charged with offences of dangerous driving and grievous bodily harm with intent) it set expectations that some others in policing have not welcomed and did not follow. Five days after the events in Liverpool, there was a serious collision in Leicester that left five pedestrians injured. Leicestershire Police took the opposite stance to the Merseyside force and declined to reveal the ethnic or nationality background details of those detained, which only 'added to the community's distress', according to Vinod Popat, a spokesman for Leicester's Hindu Community Organisation Groups. 'In the absence of clear information, speculation and anxiety began to spread, especially given Leicester's diverse and sensitive social fabric. We believe that timely and transparent communication is essential – not just for the sake of public clarity, but to uphold trust between communities and institutions,' said Popat. New interim guidance issued to forces in England and Wales today by the College of Policing and the National Police Chiefs' Council is an attempt to bring about more openness – but it does not go nearly far enough and creates the risk that different approaches will continue to be adopted by individual forces. The fresh guidance applies only to cases where a suspect has been charged. In the Merseyside and Leicestershire cases, the concerns centred mainly around events at the point of arrest; the guidance is silent on that, which means police will continue their usual practice of publishing only the age or age-group of a suspect, the general location where they live and the alleged offence for which they have been detained. There is no requirement in the guidance, nor even any suggestion, that ethnic group or nationality should be disclosed at this stage, which seems to be a glaring omission. With regards to charging, the guidance merely makes 'recommendations' to chief officers considering confirming the nationality and/or ethnicity of suspects. It contains a check-list of factors which chiefs should refer to when making such decisions, such as whether there is a 'policing purpose', a risk of 'rising community tension' or 'significant' media or social media interest. The information would be disclosed only in serious cases, such as murder and rape, where incidents have already been reported or to reassure the public. The police guidance is wide open to interpretation, as police guidance tends to be. Our system of policing leaves each of the 43 chief constables and their respective police and crime commissioners or mayors wide discretion over the way their force area is policed, in terms of priorities, strategies and communications. It is inevitable, therefore, that we will see some forces releasing ethnicity and nationality information but in similar cases other constabularies refusing to divulge it – sparking fresh rounds of misinformation, conspiracy theories and claims of cover-ups. What is needed, instead, is a simpler set of rules for police to follow. In all cases where charging decisions are publicised forces should state the ethnic group and nationality of the individual accused. Police would be permitted to depart from the rules only in exceptional circumstances, such as where the identity of a suspect could be an issue at trial. There should also be a presumption that forces disclose the ethnicity and nationality at the arrest stage in sensitive and high-profile cases. We need to reach a point where issues of race and nationality can be discussed in a calmer environment than in the current febrile atmosphere where certain crimes are singled out just because the suspect may be a foreign national, and where concerns escalate that information is being kept back for party political or politically correct reasons. Routinely making ethnicity and nationality details available will bring about a less toxic and more informed debate far more quickly than the pick-and-mix approach which this interim police guidance will undoubtedly lead to.
New Statesman
5 hours ago
- New Statesman
Visions of an English civil war
Ulster Larne Demonstration at Drumbeg. Photo by Smith Archive/Alamy Last year, amid the riots that followed the Southport murders, the great sage Elon Musk prophesied that civil war in Britain was 'inevitable'. So far, he's been proved wrong, but then prophets can claim they're just not correct yet. A year on, such talk has surged. The Financial Times reported councils, MPs and charities comparing the mood in parts of Britain to a 'tinder box' and a 'powder keg'. Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy warned that Labour's northern heartlands are so disaffected that they 'could go up in flames'. Journalists have been reporting members of the public talking about civil war; in May, Dominic Cummings told Sky News such conversations were no longer abnormal, and wrote about 'incoherent Whitehall terror of widespread white-English mobs turning political and attracting talented political entrepreneurs'. Matthew Goodwin has been demanding to know if Britain is 'about to blow'. Talk of a 'coming civil war' took off in February, when the podcaster Louise Perry recorded an interview with David Betz, a professor of war in the modern world, which duly went viral. Betz's thesis is that, driven by immigration and ethnic division, exacerbated by economic woes and reaction against elite overreach, 'civil conflict in the West' is 'practically inevitable' – and that Britain may well go first. He predicts that weak points in our energy infrastructure will come under attack; the cities will 'become ungovernable' and be seen by the indigenous rural population as 'lost to foreign occupation'. Tens of thousands may be killed each year, for years. The chances of this starting by 2029 he puts at around one in five. What is going on here? A clue lies, I think, in a striking assumption: that all this talk is unprecedented. When Perry asked why we think 'civil war won't happen here', Betz cited Brits' self-conception as 'rather peaceable, well governed, cool-headed folk'. Also taking this line, an article in UnHerd invoked the historian Robert Tombs' observation that the English harbour 'a complacent and often apathetic assumption bred by a fortunate history that nothing seriously bad can happen'. But over the last century, people in British politics have worried about civil war, repeatedly, in ways not unlike today. What did they fear, and why? And what might we learn from the fact that those fears disappeared? Even before the advent of full mass democracy, Britain was troubled by the prospect of a radical right revolt against a reckless left-liberal government. The outbreak of world war in 1914 tends to overshadow the extreme political tensions over Irish Home Rule that culminated that summer. In 1912, nearly a quarter of a million men had signed the 'Ulster Covenant', vowing to resist Home Rule by 'all means which may be found necessary'. But this happened on the 'mainland' too: in 1914, a 'British Covenant' also attracted hundreds of thousands of signatures. Its journal's motto was 'put your trust in God and keep your powder dry'. With armed volunteers openly drilling in Glasgow, Liverpool and London, and the army's willingness to enforce Home Rule in doubt, Britain was, according to the historian Dan Jackson 'arguably on the verge of civil war'. The outbreak of European conflict cut this off, but in 1916 Dublin witnessed violent rebellion against the London government. After the 1918 armistice, as full-scale war erupted in Ireland, waves of industrial strife crashed through a Britain full of angry young veterans. The government's response was sometimes startlingly militarised. In 1921, David Lloyd George solemnly announced to the Commons that he was setting up a civil defence force of volunteers to resist a joint strike by miners, railwaymen and transport workers, describing the situation as 'analogous to civil war', in the teeth of which his government were committing themselves to 'almost warlike' measures. 'For the first time in history,' he declared, according to the Times, a British government was 'confronted by an attempt to coerce the country by the destruction of its resources. The government proposed, therefore, to call for volunteers to save the mines. These men would need protection, and so a special appeal would be issued to citizens to enlist in an emergency defence force.' Union leaders lambasted the government for blithely taking on 'the grave responsibility of provoking bloodshed and civil war'. By the start of the following week, 70,000 men had joined the Defence Force. In the end, the rail and transport unions backed off, but the emerging struggle for power between the state and unionised labour continued to simmer. Days before the 1924 general election, the 'Zinoviev Letter' came to light, supposedly revealing a Soviet plot against Britain. The Daily Mail ran it on the front page, under the headline 'Civil War Plot by Socialists' Masters'. The letter was a forgery, but it hit home because in certain quarters, the scenario felt horribly real. With the Depression, and the fall of a Labour government in the face of financial crisis, this intensified. In 1933, the Labour MP Stafford Cripps delivered a lecture setting out how a newly elected socialist government would need to face down aggressive establishment resistance by suspending constitutional norms, even temporarily becoming a dictatorship. In Democracy in Crisis, Cripps' ideological ally Harold Laski suggested that in such a 'revolutionary situation… men would rapidly group themselves for civil war'. Right-wing writers like Hugh Sellon agreed: such a crisis would 'almost inevitably cause real civil war'. Reading reports from Vienna of the bloody crushing of a banned workers' militia by the right-wing authoritarian regime, some on the left found it all too easy to imagine the same thing happening here. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe With the advent of the post-war settlement after 1945, such fears faded, for a time. When Churchill's Conservatives attempted to use them against Labour in the 1945 election, they embarrassed themselves. But the arrival of Commonwealth citizens from the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent began to provoke another nightmare scenario. Today, Betz's analysis refers to theoretical warnings that 'one of the most powerful causes of civil war' arises when a dominant group perceives it is facing 'status reversal'. This recalls the fear Enoch Powell stoked in April 1968 in his 'rivers of blood' speech. Powell uncritically quoted a middle-aged worker saying 'in 15 or 20 years' time, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man'; this imaginary threat was the reason why Powell thought it appropriate to conjure visions of racial civil war. This didn't happen, but the fear that it might rippled through the Labour cabinet. Barbara Castle thought Powell had 'helped to make a race war… inevitable'. James Callaghan worried that Powell would trigger racial tension akin to the religious strife of the 17th century – when England really had descended into civil war. In 1972, something like Powell's vision was sketched out by the young liberal novelist Christopher Priest. Some of the scenes in Fugue for a Darkening Island prefigure Betz's vision of a near-future civil war today: of people fleeing 'feral' cities, and the establishment of 'secure zones'. The novel imagines a near-future Britain in which a nationalist politician preaching 'racial purity' takes power, as boats full of African refugees arrive in the Thames. The country splits into a pro-government, pro-deportation majority, and part-white, part-refugee resistance. As society disintegrates and people make knives out of bathroom mirrors, some flee the cities with their barricaded enclaves, only to find rural roads too dangerous to travel after dark, and that farms and villages that have become stockades. And while fear of racially inflected civil strife bubbled away through the 1970s, the stand-off between state, capital and labour returned. Around the time of Powell's speech, another apocalyptically minded public figure, Daily Mirror boss Cecil King, was also panicking about social collapse – because of imminent financial crisis. Nursing visions from his Irish adolescence, King took to asking 'If civil war could break out in Dublin in 1916, why couldn't it flare up in… London in… 1968.' By the early 1970s, as strikes spread and inflation pushed towards 20 per cent, even more measured establishment figures found it difficult to see a way through that did not involve the use of force to overcome the massed ranks of the pickets. Retired military commanders like Lt-Col Sir David Stirling, founder of the SAS, planned to helicopter a private army over picket lines to seize back worker-occupied factories. The Conservatives began developing their own – more cautious, but still incendiary – plans to defeat strikes. When these were leaked to the Economist in 1978, it ran them under a headline invoking the American Confederate surrender in 1865: 'Appomattox or civil war?' All this culminated in the miners' strike of 1984-85, during which leaders like Dennis Skinner warned that the army might be deployed against the strikers. That didn't happen, but nonetheless, the strike is remembered by many as a kind of civil war. Nothing so intense has happened since, but the idea still haunts our politics, as the background to last year's riots and the belated announcement of an inquiry into the Battle of Orgreave attest. Writers have continued to detect the phenomenon even in less violent events. In September 2004, a few protesters against the Blair government's ban on fox hunting invaded the Commons chamber, triggering the startling Daily Mail front page headline: 'CIVIL WAR' – an echo, doubtless unintended, of their Zinoviev Letter splash 80 years earlier. Brexit – which Betz sees, not unreasonably, as the trigger for today's divisions – was cast in TV drama as the 'uncivil war'. At least one leading Leaver saw Brussels as a latter-day Charles I. So contemporaneous fears of civil war sit in a long tradition – in which, so far, the most consistent thread is that they have not come true. Visions of unrest in the 1920s drove draconian new laws, but also moves to find compromise. Cripps' talk of suspending the constitution was driven by the urgency of dealing with mass unemployment; once the Second World War made this a more consensual goal, those scenarios became a relic. Powell's nightmare of racial civil war was chased away by the quiet efforts of working-class Brits of all races to make multicultural life work. And those 1970s calls to use force against strikers were made redundant by another shift in the bounds of the politically possible. By the early 1980s, inflation had trumped unemployment as Britain's overriding political fear; as the jobless total was allowed to rise, it undermined the unions' power years before the miners' began their last, doomed battle. So it may be that the return of talk of civil war is less a glimpse of our near future, more a signal that something has become intolerable. Clearly this is partly about immigration, but look beyond the fevered talk on YouTube, X and GB News, and something else comes into view. When Sky's Liz Bates challenged Dominic Cummings to explain what he meant by 'civil war', he didn't talk about ethnic strife, bar a passing reference to 'no-go areas'. He cited widespread anger at the decay of public services from closing police stations to inaccessible GPs, 15 years of flatlining pay, and repeated broken promises of change. This chimes with a public mood that More In Common and other pollsters have been reporting for months. Likewise, Betz mentions the pressures caused by financialisation reaching 'the end of the line'. The Starmer government knows it needs to act on illegal immigration, but if – if – it can deliver the economic change it promised, then it may be that the issue will become less intensely symbolic of wider long-term government failure. The real threat that talk of civil war expresses is that the public is so sick of being let down that trust in mainstream democratic politics may die. As in the past, such fears may help impel a government to break economic taboos and make people's lives better. There are plenty of worse scenarios, but if they can manage it, the talk of civil war will fade. And in 30 years' time, perhaps a new generation will find themselves expressing similar fears – and will complain that the British are always too complacent, and never think it can happen here. [See also: One year on, tensions still circle Britain's asylum-seeker hotels] Related
Daily Mirror
5 hours ago
- Daily Mirror
Washington Mayor slams Donald Trump's city takeover as troops flood capital
Donald Trump has hinted he will send the National Guard wing of the US armed forces to Democrat-run cities in what his supporters call a crackdown on rampant crime The Mayor of Washington DC has slammed Donald Trump's takeover of the city an "authoritarian push" as National Guard troops flood the US capital. Democrat mayor Muriel Bowser slammed Mr Trump over his crime crackdown as the US military prepares to patrol the district's streets after the Republican president branded the capital a "lawless" city. Speaking about the move on Tuesday night, she said: "This is a time when the community needs to jump in. To protect our city, to protect our autonomy, to protect our home rule. "Get to the other side of this guy and make sure we elect a Democratic House so that we have a backstop to this authoritarian push." The mayor's combative stance comes after she branded the takeover as "unprecedented," although she admitted she was not "totally surprised." It comes after Donald Trump was seen with a mystery mark in Scotland after his chronic health diagnosis. The National Guard arrived in the US capital at about 8pm on Tuesday after Mr Trump said he wanted to curb violent crime in the city. Mr Trump activated the national guard following an attempted carjacking involving DOGE employee Edward Coristine, who was beaten while trying to protect a woman. His comments are a stark contrast to his previous responses to crime in Washington DC. Following his inauguration, Mr Trump pardoned nearly 1,600 people convicted or awaiting trio for the January 6, 2021 Capitol riots with more than 600 having been convicted or pleading guilty to assault, or obstructing law enforcement and 170 of having used a deadly weapon. National Guard troops have been seen in the capital with a master sergeant telling The New York Times military Humvees parked on the National Mall was part of a "presence patrol." The Washington Post said Pentagon documents said there could be 600 troops on the ground within a single hour anywhere in the US should they be given approval. Mr Trump suggested on Monday that he could extend the takeover to other major cities in the US, such as New York City and Chicago, all Democrat-run states. Mr Trump said: "This will go further. "We're going to take back our capital…and then we'll look at other cities also." Mr Trump has the ability to send troops to Washington DC as it is not a state and is under tight federal control, his efforts to do so in states - such as California - has been challenged in the courts. While Mr Trump signalled out Democrat-run states, FBI crime statistics show four out of the five US cities with at least 100,000 residents that had the highest number of crimes against 100,000 people, were in Republican voting states. Not every agency reports to the FBI, and therefore the list is not fully complete: Memphis, Tennessee Cleveland, Ohio Toledo, Ohio Little Rock, Arkansas Peoria, Illinois Springfield, Illinois Detroit, Michigan Akron, Ohio Beaumont, Texas Rockford, Illinois Figures from Washington DC's Metropolitan Police indicates crime remains high in the capital but also suggests violent offences have fallen following a peak in 2023 and 2024. It has since reached its lowest levels in 30 years. Violent crime is down 26 per cent this year compared to the same time period last year and instances of robbery are down 28 per cent. Violent crime data is collected differently by the metropolitan police and FBI, with public data indicating a drop of 25 per cent for 2024 and a nine per cent drop, respectively. Critics have said Mr Trump's efforts are a distraction from mounting criticism over how his administration has fumbled the handling of releasing files related to the death and connections of Jeffrey Epstein. But Republicans have argued crime in major cities is out of control and has not been curbed by Democrats who run many densely populated areas of the country.
