A gunman fired 200 rounds into six CDC buildings in August 2025, killing a police officer, after his father said he was convinced the COVID vaccine had made him suicidal. When CBS's Margaret Brennan asked the director of the NIH whether his administration was doing enough to fight vaccine misinformation, he told her the real problem was her network. The White House then issued a statement saying she deserved it.
The Interview That Somehow Got Worse as It Went On
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who currently holds the remarkable double billing of NIH director and acting CDC director simultaneously, sat down with CBS Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan on Sunday. The interview started badly and accelerated from there.
Brennan brought up the August 2025 shooting at CDC headquarters in Atlanta, where DeKalb County Police Department Officer David Rose was killed. A suspect sprayed roughly 200 rounds across six CDC buildings. According to authorities, the shooter's father said his son had become fixated on the COVID-19 vaccine, believing it had caused his depression and suicidal ideation.
She asked Bhattacharya a direct question: was the administration doing enough to counter vaccine misinformation? What followed was a master class in not answering the question you were asked.
He Blamed CBS. On CBS.
Rather than address the misinformation question head-on, Bhattacharya pivoted to blaming the press, specifically calling out the network he was currently sitting on. "Even on this network and on other networks, there was a particular single point of view put across during the COVID pandemic," he said, before pivoting to school closures.
Brennan, to her credit, pushed back immediately. "This is not a productive line of claims. We covered COVID in depth on this program, like no other Sunday show did," she told him.
Bhattacharya then brought up Biden, saying the former president had personally censored him. "The Biden administration censored me," he said, explicitly. He argued that the distrust driving events like the CDC shooting did not originate with Trump or RFK Jr., but with government overreach during the pandemic, including vaccine mandates and school closures he called medically unjustified.
RFK Jr. Called the COVID Vaccine the 'Deadliest Ever.' His Boss Runs the CDC Now.
Brennan brought up HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., noting that Kennedy had publicly described the COVID vaccine as the "deadliest vaccine ever made." She said flatly that this claim was not true. Bhattacharya did not defend that specific claim, but he also did not disown it. He kept returning to the broader argument about lost institutional trust, which is a real phenomenon grounded in real research, tangled up with a set of policy conclusions that conveniently exonerate the current administration for anything.
The man who made the "deadliest vaccine" claim now oversees the Department of Health and Human Services. The man sitting across from Brennan runs both the NIH and the CDC. This is the team America has assembled to rebuild public trust in public health. Take a moment with that.
At one point, Bhattacharya accused Brennan of trying to blame the CDC shooting on RFK Jr. Brennan said she was asking about the administration's response to the shooting. They talked past each other for long enough that it started feeling intentional.
The White House Called It Fake News. Obviously.
After the interview aired, the White House issued a statement to Fox News Digital. "The Fake News media openly supported unscientific lockdowns during the pandemic era and openly supported censoring anyone who dared to question those lockdowns," spokesman Kush Desai said. "The Fake News media's continued inability to show an ounce of humility and contrition is exactly why public trust in the mainstream media is even worse than public trust in public health bodies."
So: a reporter asked the acting CDC director about a mass shooting at the CDC, connected to vaccine misinformation, and the official White House response was to call the question fake news and accuse the network of causing the distrust that led to the shooting. This is the administration currently responsible for national public health policy.
The New York Post also quoted Curtis Houck from NewsBusters, a conservative media watchdog, who said Brennan's interview proved CBS had not become "MAGA TV" under editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, despite accusations from liberal critics. He called Brennan's line of questioning "hectoring" and "insidious smears." Houck's read: the interview was an attack. Brennan's read: it was a question. You can decide which one makes more sense when a cop is dead and the suspect thought vaccines were killing him.
Oh, and There Is an Executive Order on Vaccines and Autism
Brennan also confronted Bhattacharya about a reported executive order linking vaccines to autism. The New York Post noted this but did not detail his response. The fact that such an executive order is apparently real enough to ask a sitting NIH director about on national television is its own small horror, delivered casually near the end of a very long Sunday morning.
The scientific consensus on vaccines and autism is not ambiguous. It has been studied exhaustively. The original 1998 Wakefield paper that planted this particular conspiracy was retracted, and Wakefield lost his medical license. That a White House executive order may be treating it as an open question is the kind of sentence that would have ended careers five years ago.
The Dingo Take
A police officer is dead. He was killed by a man who believed, based on misinformation spreading through exactly the channels this administration has amplified and legitimized, that a vaccine had destroyed his son's mind. Brennan asked whether the administration was doing enough to fight that misinformation. The answer she got was a lecture about school closures, a Biden complaint, and a White House statement calling her outlet fake news. That is not a rebuttal. That is a confession.
Bhattacharya is not entirely wrong that pandemic-era government messaging was sometimes botched, that mandates created backlash, that institutional credibility took real hits. These are legitimate critiques worth engaging. But "the government made mistakes too" is not an answer to the question of whether your boss calling the COVID vaccine the deadliest ever made is helping or hurting. It is a subject change wearing a lab coat.
The people now in charge of rebuilding public trust in American public health have spent years feeding the exact distrust they claim to oppose. They are the ones telling audiences that vaccines might be causing autism, that public health agencies are corrupt, that anyone who disagreed with their COVID takes was being censored by shadowy forces. And now they sit in the big chairs and wonder why nobody trusts the institutions they spent years torching. Officer David Rose deserved better than to become a talking point in this argument. His family deserved better too.
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