Former CDC Director Mandy Cohen on the agency’s chaos: ‘I am very worried’ | Opinion
As onetime director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Dr. Mandy Cohen sought not only to protect the nation’s health, but also to heal the agency’s pandemic-battered image.
Her approach was the same one as she used as leader of North Carolina’s Department of Health and Human Services during the peak of COVID – be transparent, explain your actions and build trust with the public.
That approach worked in North Carolina and at the CDC, but this week Cohen has seen the progress she helped make at the federal agency shattered by the actions of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. After the CDC director and top CDC officials balked at Kennedy’s demand for limits on vaccine development and access, the agency’s director, Susan Monarez, was fired and at least four top officials resigned
“It is a huge blow to our ability to respond effectively and I am very worried,” Cohen told me on Thursday. “I think that folks (at the CDC) are wanting to rebuild trust and this ongoing pattern of attack on institutions, on the individual experts, on evidence and science is eroding trust.”
Cohen, who still lives in Raleigh, served as CDC director from July 2023 to January 2025. She said the current chaos at the CDC is putting the public’s health at risk.
“What that means for people is that we won’t have the talent or the capability to respond to the next health threat. That could be something we know about already. That could be measles, or malaria that is carried by mosquitoes, or could be something we don’t know the name of yet,” she said. “It’s the kind of thing you need to prepare for over years and decades, and losing leadership at this moment is very concerning.”
The loss of the CDC leaders wasn’t entirely unexpected by Cohen. People inside the agency have reached out to her for advice and encouragement as Kennedy has criticized the CDC’s pandemic performance, overseen the layoff of more than 1,000 employees and claimed that vaccines may be more harmful than preventative.
“I have been hearing from senior leaders who felt they could no longer stay and be part of the agency because of what was happening,” Cohen said.
Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, who resigned Thursday as director of the National Center on Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said in his resignation letter that Kennedy and other vaccine skeptics are putting politics ahead of sound medical actions.
“Their desire to please a political base will result in death and disability of vulnerable children and adults,” he wrote. “Their base should be the people they serve, not a political voting bloc.”
Kennedy says what he’s doing at the CDC is not creating chaos or pandering to those who share his unorthodox views on vaccines. He told Fox News on Thursday that, “The agency is in trouble and we need to fix it, and we are fixing it and it may be that some people shouldn’t be working there anymore.”
Apart from the vaccine issue, Cohen said she supports much of what Kennedy is advocating with his “Make America Healthy Again” agenda. But his disruption and derision of the CDC won’t serve those goals, she said.
“I think there’s a lot about his focus that is right, to improve the health of communities, to tackle chronic disease, to make sure our food supply is nutritious, to make sure our water is safe to drink. I think all of those are fantastic priorities,” she said. “The question is how do you make that happen. You have to use data and experts on what works and you need to support the experts, the folks who have been dedicating their lives to understanding the issues and trying to find solutions.”
Instead of overhauling the CDC, Kennedy is upending it. The ousted director was his hand-picked choice, but he fired her after less than a month in the job.
Cohen said the real damage is not the loss of a political appointee, but the departure of longtime CDC experts.
“They are some of the folks who had the most experience with infectious disease in this country and I think that their know-how walking out the door makes us more vulnerable and less prepared for the next outbreak,” she said. “If you take away the talent and you take away the funding you’re not leaving an agency the tools to fulfill its mission.”
Associate opinion editor Ned Barnett can be reached at 919-404-7583, or nbarnett@newsobserver.com
This story was originally published August 29, 2025 at 10:27 AM.