President Biden’s pick to head the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a “proven track record protecting Americans’ health and safety,” according to the White House, but critics attacked her support for strict mandates and lockdowns and questioned her latest employer’s ties to the Gates Foundation and World Economic Forum.
President Biden’s pick to head the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has a “proven track record protecting Americans’ health and safety,” according to the White House.
The White House cited Dr. Mandy Cohen’s “leadership through the COVID-19 crisis” for drawing “bipartisan praise” and her “ability to find common ground and put complex policy into action.”
But critics of Biden’s appointee who spoke with The Defender took a different view of Cohen’s track record — especially her support for lockdowns and mandates during the pandemic, when she led North Carolina’s pandemic response as head of North Carolina’s Department of Health and Human Services (NCDHHS).
“Cohen appears to be fully entrenched in the ‘bio-pharmaceutical complex,’” Dr. Peter McCulloughtold The Defender.
McCullough, author of “The Courage to Face COVID-19: Preventing Hospitalization and Death While Battling the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex,” said:
“She was on the wrong side of every pandemic public health intervention, failed to recognize early therapeutics and natural immunity, and to date has not acknowledged the safety disaster unfolding with the COVID-19 mass, indiscriminate, vaccination program.”
Alex Berenson, commentator and former New York Times journalist, described Cohen as “a public health COVID authoritarian” and “the worst possible person to become the next CDC head” — which he said proves the Biden administration “has learned all the wrong lessons since 2021.”
And according to Jeffrey A. Tucker, founder and president of the Brownstone Institute, “Going through [Cohen’s] timeline is a strange blast from the past of heartbreaking fear-mongering, pseudo-science, and propaganda. She passed with flying colors all three tests of compliance: closures, masking, and vaccine mandates.”
The New York Post cited videos showing Cohen “gloating about implementing COVID lockdowns, inconsistently following her own mitigation guidelines and forcing public schools to have students masked indoors regardless of vaccination status.”
Cohen will take over the agency in early July. She replaces Dr. Rochelle Walensky, who has led the CDC since January 2021. Walensky, who submitted her resignation in May citing the end of the national COVID-19 emergency, will depart June 30.
Cohen’s appointment did not require a Senate hearing. However, the recently passed omnibus spending bill requires Senate confirmation beginning in January 2025.
According to Politico, “Cohen’s charge is, officially, to restore trust in an agency that its outgoing director, Rochelle Walensky, has acknowledged ‘did not reliably meet expectations’ after COVID arrived. ” Her “official work at CDC will revolve around the agency overhaul that Walensky started.”
According to The New York Times, Cohen was “the top choice of Jeffrey D. Zients,” the Biden administration’s former COVID-19 response coordinator.
Walensky’s handling of the pandemic response, believed by some to be responsible for waning public trust in the agency, was the subject of a contentious hearing before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
Walensky congratulated Cohen, describing her as “a respected public health leader who helped North Carolina successfully navigate” COVID-19, and whose “unique experience and accomplished tenure in North Carolina … make her perfectly suited to lead CDC as it moves forward by building on the lessons learned from COVID-19 to create an organization poised to meet public health challenges of the future.”
