Republicans are trying to rewrite history with COVID and Mandy Cohen | Opinion

One of Gov. Roy Cooper’s under-appreciated accomplishments is that he persuaded Dr. Mandy Cohen to be his secretary of Health and Human Services.

Cohen has a stellar resume: She was educated at Cornell, Yale and Harvard and was chief of staff at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services during the Obama administration. Why she agreed to serve a politically polarized state where the legislature was still resisting Medicaid expansion and neglecting the state’s public health system is a wonder.

And, it turned out, highly fortunate. Cohen, who served at the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) from 2017 until January of 2022, was at the helm of public health service when the COVID pandemic hit in March of 2020. In a series of news conferences during an anxious and increasingly divided time she brought warmth and clarity in describing what the state was doing and what people should do for themselves.

Largely on the strength of that performance, Cohen is expected to be named by President Joe Biden as the next leader of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

This should be a time for North Carolina to be proud that one of their former top officials is taking a major federal post. But this being a North Carolina split between a reactionary legislature and a Cooper administration trying to keep the state on a sensible course, it’s not.

Conservative Republicans promptly started rewriting history by saying that the school closures, limits on gatherings and mask requirements supported by Cohen were useless intrusions on freedom carried out by nanny state bureaucrats who overreacted.

Republican state Treasurer Dale Folwell, who is seeking the 2024 GOP gubernatorial nomination, fired the first shot with this tweet: “Pray for our country. As a member of the NC Council of State, my observation is that the actions of Dr. Mandy Cohen during COVID resulted in more disease, death, poverty and illiteracy. As NC governor, I would be hard pressed to ever follow her lead at CDC if chosen by the POTUS.”

Folwell told me this week that he was frustrated by the rollout of the COVID vaccines and his unsuccessful appeal to DHHS for more testing of prison employees, who might take the virus home. He said Cohen did not challenge assumptions about COVID and “did not seem to have the vision or the ability to listen and the courage to act once everything was considered.”

State Sen. Dan Blue, a Wake County Democrat and the Senate’s minority leader, said of Folwell’s tweet, “That’s an irresponsible comment for somebody in a high position. If anything, the way (Cohen) managed the pandemic saved many lives and saved many hospitals that were in distress from being overrun.”

Despite Folwell’s contention, North Carolina consistently fared among the best in the South thanks to public health measures Cohen advocated. The economy did well, too.

Nonetheless, Folwell’s criticism won’t be the last. Cohen does not need to be confirmed by the Senate, but she will no doubt be blasted by right-wingers in Congress. Their talking points were previewed in a New York Post column this week by James Bovard.

“President Joe Biden’s choice for new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention chief is a telegenic authoritarian straight from liberal central casting,” he wrote.

Bovard went on to quote the writer Alex Berenson, once banned from Twitter for spreading COVID misinformation, who said, “Cohen has heartily supported every authoritarian measure that the last three years have proven useless.”

Such distortions are maddening to those who know that public health measures, while not perfectly precise, did protect the public’s health and blunt the pandemic that caused the deaths of more than 1 million Americans.

Dr. David Wohl, an infectious disease physician at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said Cohen’s leadership helped cut the toll of the pandemic. “She was clear in balancing the trade-offs between safeguarding public health and the costs of these strategies. In states without such leadership, more people per capita became ill and died,” Wohl said.

Conservatives will try to discount Cohen’s work in North Carolina, but the truth is the state was lucky to have her at a time when all her training and talents were called upon. And the nation would be fortunate to have her, a battle-tested leader, at the helm of the CDC.

This story was originally published June 8, 2023 at 4:30 AM.