Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. refused to blame vaccine misinformation for the recent shooting at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, rejecting criticism about the role he’s played in sowing distrust in the life-saving shots.

The shooter, who set his sights on the agency’s Georgia complex, fired over 180 shots in Friday’s attack, killing one police officer. The gunman died in the attack “from a self-inflicted gunshot wound,” Georgia officials confirmed Tuesday.

Law enforcement officials have made clear that the man attacked the CDC over his misgivings with the COVID vaccine, citing, in part, documents they recovered from his home in which he expressed those views.

But in an interview with Scripps News first released Monday, Kennedy refused to blame misinformation as one of the driving forces behind Friday’s horrific shooting, even as some CDC staffers have expressed concerns about his past misleading statements about vaccines.

“We don’t know enough about what the motive was of this individual, but people can ask questions without being penalized,” Kennedy said.

But CDC Director Susan Monarez on Tuesday acknowledged to the agency’s staff that “misinformation can be dangerous,” while Jeff Williams, who oversees safety at the agency, described the incident as a “targeted attack … related to COVID-19.”

During the Scripps News interview, Kennedy said he is trying to return the CDC, which he described as a “shining star health agency,” to “gold standard science.” He then proceeded to condemn the U.S. government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, including its effort to vaccinate Americans, which is credited with saving millions of lives.

“One of the things that we saw during COVID is that the government was overreaching and in its efforts to persuade the public to get vaccinated, and they were saying things that were not always true, and public health agencies should never do that,” Kennedy said.

Kennedy, who has previously called the CDC a “cesspool of corruption” and claimed the agency’s effort to vaccinate children ignored vaccines’ harms, likening the approach to the cover-up of child sexual abuse by the Catholic Church, did not cite any evidence to support his baseless claims.

The Trump administration official also defended his department’s decision to pull contracts and funding for vaccine development using mRNA technology, discounting criticism by other health experts, including former Trump Surgeon General Jerome Adams, who warned, “this move is going to cost lives.”
“We were told during COVID, trust the experts. But trusting the experts is not a feature of either science or democracy,” Kennedy said. “With science, there’s always questions, and we’re always encouraged to ask them.”