Margaret Brennan Shamelessly Pins the CDC Shooting on Right-Wing Purveyors of ‘Misinformation’

Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks. This week, we look at Margaret Brennan’s recent leading interview with NIH head Jay Bhattacharya on the one year anniversary of the shooting at the CDC’s Atlanta headquarters, and we cover more media misses.

Read more Acting AG Todd Blanche Narrowly Clears Confirmation Threshold After Murkowski, Collins Defect

Margaret Brennan Blames Trump Admin’s ‘Misinformation’ for 2025 CDC Headquarters Shooting
NIH director Jay Bhattacharya appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation for an interview with Margaret Brennan over the weekend. But what followed could more aptly be described as Brennan lecturing Bhattacharya, and accusing him and other Trump administration officials of instigating a shooting at the CDC headquarters in Atlanta last year.

Bhattacharya appeared on the program to mark the anniversary of the shooting, which left one police officer and the shooter dead.

But Brennan proceeded to ask a series of increasingly accusatory questions, while leaving Bhattacharya little-to-no airtime to respond.

She began by discussing the death of officer David Rose, whom she described as a “combat veteran, a United States Marine, who had just graduated five months prior from the police academy” and who left three kids behind.

“The shooter was motivated by misinformation about the Covid vaccine,” she said. “That is why he shot over 100 bullets into the windows of the CDC. Is enough being done to counter this kind of misinformation?”

Bhattacharya, who recently spent time with Rose’s widow, called the shooting “horrific” and began to suggest it wasn’t a worthwhile use of time to try to parse out the precise motivation of mentally ill shooters.

The host interrupted him for the first of several times, claiming the shooter’s father “said he was brainwashed about the Covid vaccine and thought it was making him suicidal. That’s what he’s — the vengeance was when he said he was going to shoot up the CDC.”

“I mean I think we shouldn’t be putting our emphasis on the shooter,” the NIH director replied.

But media interviews with the family of the shooter, 30-year-old Patrick Joseph White, reveal a man who was facing severe mental health struggles, rather than someone who studiously internalized online anti-vaccine arguments and then acted on them. Dispatch records show at least eleven calls to 911 from the family’s home in the year preceding the shooting.

Georgia Bureau of Investigation officials said they found documents written by White in which he ranted against the Covid-19 vaccine, including one entry that read, “the covid shots were always meant to indiscriminately murder as many as possible . . .”

But his father, retired federal investigator Ken White, said, “I know my son wanted to make this about ‘the jab,’ and that was his latest cause, but this is more about mental health than anything.”

The family said Patrick White’s mental health had deteriorated over the course of two years, and they believed he was struggling with depression, but were unsure whether he was formally diagnosed. White, who took his own life after firing bullets into the CDC headquarters, left behind medication bottles prescribed for depression, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder in his home.

Body camera footage from a police response to the White family home in the summer of 2024 during a mental health episode shows White telling officers he’s in serious physical pain, and mentioning a back surgery he had about ten years earlier.

Ken White told officers in a separate room that his son had been dealing with pain for a while, but that several doctors had been unable to find anything wrong with him.

Ken White called 911 on that day because his son had gotten hold of a gun. But Patrick White told officers it was a “cry for help” and that the gun wasn’t loaded. “I didn’t have any intention to get hurt.”

He told officers he believed the Covid-19 vaccine had caused him and his dad to become “severely ill.”

“They made me take it, and I’ve never been . . . You don’t feel like you’re the same. And I try to tell them, and they call me . . . some sort of a conspiracy theorist,” he said.

Ken White, who was suffering from cancer at the time, told police his son had been threatening to kill himself for weeks in what amounted to “emotional blackmail.”

That night, some eleven months before the CDC headquarters shooting, Patrick White was involuntarily committed to a local hospital, where he stayed for one week before being discharged.

But despite the White family and their attorney pointing to Patrick White’s mental health struggles, Brennan seemed to try, during her interview with Bhattacharya, to remove the personal responsibility from the shooter, or even to acknowledge the role that mental health had played in his motivations.

Read more Senate Panel Votes to Hold Fauci in Contempt

Instead, Brennan tried to blame the shooting on public health officials who failed to keep their heads down and accept the prevailing narratives on Covid-19 safety measures.

Bhattacharya, for his part, tried to explain that censorious government bureaucrats and media allies like Brennan were themselves partially responsible for the loss of trust in public health institutions. By shutting down legitimate lines of inquiry as conspiratorial and illegitimate, they made people even more skeptical of the government’s pronouncements.

Brennan shut him down: “This is not a productive line of claims. We covered Covid in depth on this program, like no other Sunday show did.”

“I’m not blaming you specifically,” he replied. “What I’m saying is, you want to talk about misinformation, the kinds of decisions and sort of the public sort of face of public health during the pandemic led to many people losing trust in public health —”

But Brennan herself — who at the time was a media darling in her own right, receiving plenty of positive coverage for guiding the Sunday morning show through the pandemic — did participate in some of the shaming and doomsday-predictions that turned many Americans off from listening to public health officials and the media.

In January 2021, Brennan claimed “bad behavior over the holidays, as defined by CDC guidelines” threatened to make January “the deadliest month yet, in years since the virus was discovered.”

Two months later, as vaccines became more widely available to Americans, she took a dour tone on loosening restrictions. She claimed increased access to vaccines and pandemic relief funds brought with them “concern about Americans moving too quickly to get back to normal.”

“With sunny states easing or in some cases dropping health restrictions completely, spring break 2021 is off to a busy start, that is for a country that’s far from finished with COVID-19,” she said at the time, going on to say that booming spring break travel brought with it “cause for concern.”

During this weekend’s interview with Bhattacharya, Brennan insisted that the spreading of Covid misinformation was limited to Trump administration officials, ignoring Bhattacharya’s own experience of being censored on social media, at the behest of Biden administration officials, for questioning lockdowns and other Covid policy sacred cows.

“Just so we’re clear, the Biden administration censored me, right? They censored — they sent out direct attacks on people who disagreed on the Covid — on sort of whether the Covid vaccine stopped it,” Bhattacharya said, as Brennan cut in to say Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is now the secretary of Health and Human Services, called the Covid vaccine “the deadliest vaccine ever made.”

“That is misinformation. And we’re not being clear about that. And I think that is dangerous, wouldn’t you agree?” she said.

“People lost their jobs, Margaret, because the Biden administration censored people and said, look, you can’t even talk about the Covid vaccine harms,” he said, adding, “I’m talking about why you have the kind of distrust that’s led to the kind of — sort of problems that you’re talking — were talking about earlier in public health. That distrust was not caused by President Trump. And it wasn’t caused by Bobby.”

The misinformation was actually “often spread by the government itself regarding natural immunity, closing of schools, closures of mask mandates,” he said.

He concluded by bluntly calling out Brennan for “trying to blame the shooting” on Kennedy.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration’s attempts to censor Bhattacharya and others who questioned their Covid protocol is well-documented. A federal appeals court ruled that the White House, surgeon general, CDC, and FBI “likely violated the First Amendment” by pressuring social media platforms to censor Bhattacharya, then a Stanford University epidemiologist, and others.

Headline Fail of the Week

Sports Illustrated was widely lambasted last week for publishing a headline that read, “Sophie Cunningham Got a Bitter Taste of Karma After Drawing Flagrant Foul in Fever-Sky.”

The headline appeared to celebrate a hard foul against Indiana Fever star Sophie Cunningham, who has been outspoken about fairness in women’s sports. The foul in question came when Chicago’s DiJonai Carrington clotheslined Cunningham during a layup attempt. While the dust-up left Cunningham with a bloodied mouth, Sports Illustrated told readers the first-quarter strike on the Indiana Fever star, which was upgraded to a Flagrant 2, was merely an example of Cunningham getting what she deserved.

After receiving backlash, the headline was updated to read: “Sophie Cunningham’s Enforcer Role Gets Reversed Onto Her With Hard Foul in Fever-Sky.”

Media Misses• Several outlets publish stories on the AI space without appropriately divulging that those stories are written by reporting fellows whose salaries are paid by donor-supported AI journalism groups, according to a new report from Fox News. The Tarbell Center for AI Journalism has placed fellows with outlets including Bloomberg, Time, NBC News, The Guardian, and the Los Angeles Times, according to the report. The fellows cover topics like Anthropic, deepfakes, AI in geopolitics, misuse, the economy and misinformation. While Tarbell says it does not direct its fellows’ coverage, the center receives funding from several groups that advocate for AI safety, including Coefficient Giving, the Future of Life Institute, the EA Infrastructure Fund, and the Survival and Flourishing Fund, raising questions about possible biases in the coverage that have, in some cases, gone undisclosed. Fox News cited at least two examples, including one article published in Time that called Anthropic’s AI a “world-class model” after the Tarbell fellow visited the company’s California headquarters, but failed to disclose the reporter’s relationship to Tarbell.

• Conservative voices are likely to be represented in the New York Times opinion pages even less going forward than they are now, as just two of the section’s twelve featured columnists now identify as conservative after the departure of writer Ross Douthat — and even those two columnists, David French and Bret Stephens, supported Democrat Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.

Read more Fetterman Vows to Leave Democratic Party If Anti-Israel Progressives Take Over