why does it matter: Dr. Cohen will oversee CDC’s response to public health crises.
The appointment does not require Senate confirmation, meaning Dr. Cohen may take over leadership of the CDC as soon as Dr. Walensky leave office. Congress recently passed legislation requiring the agency’s director to be confirmed, but the provision won’t go into effect until 2025.
In her own statement Friday, Dr. Walensky said Dr. Cohen was “perfectly suited to lead CDC as it moves forward based on the lessons learned from Covid-19.”
The Biden administration allowed the federal Covid public health emergency declaration to expire in May. Dr. Cohen will oversee the CDC’s recently revised efforts to track the coronavirus, including wastewater. He will also be responsible for a broad set of public health crises managed at the agency’s centers, including other infectious disease outbreaks and opioid use.
The CDC has faced decrease in public confidence as the nation recovers from a pandemic in which the agency scrapped early efforts to test Americans, allowed political interference in its scientific literature and offered what health experts say it was a confusing guide to testing, masking and understanding the spread of the virus.
It was said that Dr. Cohen was the top candidate from a long list of names that administration officials whittled down in recent weeks. He was the top choice of Jeffrey D. Zients, the White House chief of staff and the former Biden administration’s Covid response coordinator, according to a person familiar with the search process.
background: Dr. Cohen brings experience in the public and private sectors.
Dr. Cohen, an internist and executive at Aledade, a company that supports community health clinics and doctors, served in the Obama administration, including as chief operating officer and chief of staff for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services.
Dr. Ashish K. Jha, who left the White House this week after leading the Biden administration’s Covid-19 response, said Dr. Cohen has unusually strong public and private sector credentials for a chief from CDC.
“One of the things we’ve learned in this pandemic and other public health crises is that an effective response requires bringing together both public health and the health care delivery system,” he said. “There are very few people who have great experience in both.”
Dr. Cohen also oversaw North Carolina’s Covid-19 response as a political appointee at a time of divided state government, experience that some public health experts said could translate to the complexities of running an agency. based in Atlanta within the Washington-based Department of Health. and Human Services.
“What’s important now with an incoming CDC director is the ability to work with officials in Washington and around the country,” said Dr. Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
Before Biden announced his intention to nominate Dr. Cohen, a group of Republican lawmakers wrote to him opposing his likely selection, citing his support for mask requirements and saying he had “politicized science.”
What follows: Dr. Cohen will be busy overseeing an agency review.
Dr. Walensky last year began a broad effort to reorganize what public health experts say is a chronically underfunded agency, a process that Dr. Cohen. This includes work to modernize its data systems and improve its communications with the public.
