More than four months into President Trump’s second term, the CDC is still being run by an acting director, and the situation is said to be causing much uncertainty at the agency.
In May, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told a Senate committee that Matthew Buzzelli, the CDC’s chief of staff, is serving as acting director. Buzzelli is a lawyer with no public health experience.
A CDC spokesman told Axios that Buzzelli has been performing somne of the director’s tasks, but didn’t explain who is responsible for other duties.
Sen. Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Del.), who asked RFK Jr. who was running CDC at the May 14 hearing, told the online news publication that the CDC hasn’t provided any additional information about who is running the agency since that hearing.
Susan Monarez has been nominated as the permanent head of the agency, yet the Senate has yet to schedule hearings on her nomination. Her current CDC title is principal deputy director.
The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee told Axios that a hearing has yet to be scheduled as not all the paperwork needed is in order.
Axios spoke with an agency employee who said that colleagues also aren’t sure who is running the agency.
“We’re being so inefficient, so grossly inefficient, because we cannot make decisions,” the employee said. “We’re spending a lot of time planning for all these contingencies that we wouldn’t normally have to plan for if we actually had some leadership.”
“You want to make sure the agency is ready should there be a public health emergency,” former acting CDC director Richard Besser, who now leads the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, said. “That’s something you can’t plan for, and given it can take time to get a permanent director in place, you want to make sure that the agency is able to do its work appropriately.”
On June 3, Lakshmi Panagiotakopoulos, a CDC employee who provided information to members of the agency’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices on COVID-19 vaccines, said she was resigning amid a disagreement with RFK Jr. on COVID immunization practices.
Dear readers: We recognize that politics often intersects with the financial news of the day, so we invite you to click here to join the separate political discussion.
More on Moderna, Pfizer
- Pfizer: I Should Have Sold Earlier (Downgrade)
- Pfizer’s R&D Optimization Delivers Great Results & Secure Dividends
- Moderna: Vaccine Approval (Finally!) Provides A Reason To Be Cheerful
- RFK Jr. says Moderna agreed to another clinical trial to support new COVID shot
- Takeda, Pfizer’s Adcetrix wins EU approval for hodgkin lymphoma