The CDC doesn't have a director. Can it respond to public health threats?
NPR's Michel Martin speaks with former CDC official Demetre Daskalakis about the absence of a CDC director and the government's ability to respond to public health threats.
LEILA FADEL, HOST: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does not have a director. The former interim director, Jay Bhattacharya, has exceeded the time he was legally allowed to lead the CDC. The White House has not nominated anyone new to run the public health agency which predicts and helps control the spread of disease. Bhattacharya also directs the National Institutes of Health. The Trump administration says he will keep leading the CDC, too, just without the title.MICHEL MARTIN, HOST: We wanted to consider what the impact might be from someone who knows the agency well. So we've called Dr. Demetre Daskalakis. He was a top CDC scientist until he resigned last summer over the firing of the CDC's last confirmed director. Dr. Daskalakis, thanks so much for talking to us.DEMETRE DASKALAKIS: Thank you so much for having me.MARTIN: So it's not just that the director's chair will be - well, they say it won't be empty, but it won't be filled with a confirmed director. It turns out that a lot of leadership roles at CDC are empty, including your former position as head of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. And I was wondering, does the fact that there aren't leaders in place at these jobs change what the CDC can do?DASKALAKIS: So the short answer is that leadership vacuums at CDC that are brief are something that you can deal with. But when they're this long, what happens is the ship starts to feel a little rudderless, like it doesn't have a captain.MARTIN: Can you give me an example of how leadership makes a difference? Just say, for example, in your former division for immunization and respiratory disease.DASKALAKIS: Sure.MARTIN: How does the lack of a leader in an agency like that make a difference?DASKALAKIS: Yeah, how's measles? That's probably a good one. In my center, I have measles experts. But being the leader of the center means that you're able to contextualize the work that they're doing. So, you know, when the West Wing calls and says we want to know what's going on with measles, they generally call the CDC director, who needs to have connectivity down deeper into the organization to be able to answer those questions with authority. So you need to have that leadership, that scientific leadership, to make sure that you're delivering on what the mission is of your center and ultimately of the agency. If you cared about an agency so important to the health of America, you would prioritize identifying a leader and installing them.MARTIN: So while the CDC is director-less, can the public trust the data and the research coming out of the CDC right now?DASKALAKIS: So the problem is, if you can't trust some of it, can you trust any of it, right? So I think it's fair to say that some of the things coming out of CDC around immunization and vaccines, around race and ethnicity, you have to take those with of grain of salt now because they've been influenced by ideology. So I think that at the end of the day, you have to look at your clinician. So if you have a doctor, they're professional organizations. And frankly, the local health departments, whether it's state or city or county, because they now have been given the very hard work of differentiating the signal from noise that's coming out of HHS.MARTIN: HHS is saying that Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is still running the agency. He will be running the agency. He will be functioning in that role but without the title. Does that not give you any comfort at all that the work still will be done?DASKALAKIS: I don't know Dr. Bhattacharya personally, so I imagine that he has infinite capacity. But, you know, seemingly, he has a large vacuum of leaders at NIH with a very similar story, with many of the institutes unstaffed by permanent leaders - very similar to what you're seeing at CDC with the center directors and other offices. So I don't see that it's possible for a human to indefinitely cover both of these roles and expect that there's going to be success in either.MARTIN: That is Dr. Demetre Daskalakis. He was a top scientist at the CDC until he resigned last summer. He is now the chief medical officer of the Callen-Lorde Community Health Center in New York. Dr. Daskalakis, thanks so much for sharing these insights with us.DASKALAKIS: Thank you so much.(SOUNDBITE OF YPPAH'S "SOFT RESET")MARTIN: We reached out to the Department of Health and Human Services and the White House for comment on the leadership vacancies. HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon wrote that both the CDC and NIH continue to fulfill their missions, and the search for a new CDC director is ongoing.(SOUNDBITE OF YPPAH'S "SOFT RESET")
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