Biden taps former Obama staffer as new CDC director as the agency's repuation ... trends now
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President Joe Biden is slated to appoint Dr Mandy Cohen, former North Carolina Health Secretary, to head up the beleaguered Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Dr Cohen will assume the position at the end of the month when outgoing CDC chief Rochelle Walensky will step down.
The Obama-era health official is also a trained internal medicine physician who helped run the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) which oversees government-issued healthcare benefits, and aided in the implementation of Obamacare.
Most notably, Dr Cohen spent four years as North Carolina's health secretary where she speerheaded the state's pandemic response, a position that gave her the public health bona fides necessary to head up the sprawling federal health agency.
The announcement comes at a frought moment for the CDC and its reputation after a succession of fatal missteps in addressing the pandemic, from manufacturing inaccurate Covid-19 tests to relaying contradictory messages about safety.
Dr Mandy Cohen is a Yale-trained physician with a masters in public health from Harvard University. President Biden has not made a formal announcement yet, which is expected to come later this month when current CDC director Rochelle Walensky steps down
In response to news of the appointment, North Carolina's Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper said: 'Mandy Cohen used a steady hand to help my administration lead North Carolina through the
