I do really want to emphasize that while there is substantial opportunity here for evolution, modernization and performance improvement at the CDC, it has also done a lot of things well and we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that in the midst of a pandemic there were many other public health activities going on. CDC teams were deployed all over the United States and internationally to assist with local response efforts. The CDC Foundation stepped up and engaged some 3,000 or more people to help the workforce shortages and so forth, so there were a lot of very positive things that happened and we need to make sure that we don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater here when we’re looking at the really critical things that need to be fixed, but also to appreciate and respect what our public health system has been able to accomplish for the past three years.

Julie Gerberding

Julie Louise Gerberding (born August 22, 1955) is an American infectious disease expert who was the first woman to serve as the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). As of May 2022, she is the CEO of the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (FNIH). Gerbering grew up in Estelline, South Dakota, attended Brookings High School, and earned undergraduate and graduate degrees from Case Western Reserve University. She was the chief medical resident at the University of California, San Francisco where she treated hospitalized AIDS patients in the first years of the epidemic. Gerberding became a nationally-recognized figure during the 2001 anthrax attacks in the United States during her tenure as the acting deputy director of the National Center for Infectious Diseases, where she was a prominent spokeswoman for the CDC during daily briefings regarding the attacks and aftermath. Gerberding then served as CDC director from 2002-2009, and was then hired as an administrator at Merck.

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