President Biden is expected to pick North Carolina’s former health secretary — who pushed aggressive COVID restrictions during the pandemic — as his next director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Dr. Mandy Cohen, who served as the Tar Heel State’s top health official from 2017 to 2021, will join the agency as its current director, Rochelle Walensky departs at a time of declining public trust.
Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra spoke with Cohen earlier this week to congratulate her on the nomination, according to the Washington Post, which first reported the news.
In a NBC News poll taken last year, just 44% of Americans said they trusted the CDC, compared with 69% at the start of the coronavirus outbreak.
After reports of Cohen’s appointment surfaced, posts on social media showed her gloating about implementing COVID lockdowns, inconsistently following her own mitigation guidelines and forcing public schools to have students masked indoors regardless of vaccination status.
The ex-health secretary recalled at one point advising Massachusetts Health Secretary Marylou Sudders to shutter football stadiums to fall in line with North Carolina’s COVID mandates.
“She was like, ‘Are you gonna let them have professional football?’ And I was like, ‘No.’ And she’s like, ‘OK neither are we,’” Cohen said with a chuckle.
In video footage from June 2021, Cohen also claimed COVID-19 vaccinations would prevent breakthrough cases as well as further transmission of the virus — a claim also made by Walensky and one that was proven false.
Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health awarded Cohen its Leadership in Public Health Practice Award in 2020 for leading the Tar Heel State’s pandemic response — and she was briefly considered to lead the CDC in 2021 before Biden appointed Walensky, who had been on Harvard Medical School’s faculty for almost two decades.
The CDC declined to comment on Cohen’s appointment.
The White House and Cohen did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
“Someone in the confirmation hearing should ask the new @cdcgov director nominee about how she got the science so consequentially wrong. Lots of bad answers possible,” Stanford School of Medicine Professor Jay Bhattacharya said on Twitter Friday of Cohen’s past remarks.
“A good response [would be] ‘I’ll surround myself with scientists with a diverse set of views so it doesn’t happen again.’”
Cohen also founded Doctors for Obama in 2008, which was rebranded as Doctors for America following his election, and went on to work in the former president’s administration beginning in 2013 as a senior adviser and later chief of staff at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a subagency of the US Department of Health and Human Services.
The group has advocated for addressing climate change and gun violence as public health crises and endorsed legislation to reallocate billions of dollars from police budgets for alternative public safety agencies, according to the watchdog group Activist Facts.
“In its oversight capacity, Congress, watchdog organizations, and the public should keep a close eye on Dr. Cohen to ensure a leftwing political agenda doesn’t compromise the core mission of the CDC,” the group said in a statement.
Walensky has announced she will leave the CDC on June 30, citing in her resignation letter the end of the national emergency declaration for the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I have never been prouder of anything I have done in my professional career,” the 54-year-old infectious diseases specialist wrote to Biden, though she also noted last year the agency’s “performance did not reliably meet expectations” under her leadership.
Walensky previously took fire as leader of the CDC for having botched the Biden administration’s COVID response on vaccination and mask mandates.
She also faced criticism for having coordinated with the powerful American Federation of Teachers on school reopening guidelines in 2021, letting the teachers union suggest language for some of the guidance documents.
Walensky has agreed to testify before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic on June 13 about the influence nongovernmental groups such as teachers unions had over public health mandates during the outbreak.
