Dr. Jennifer Shuford is resigning as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s deputy director and chief medical officer just four months after President Trump appointed her to help steady the agency. The resignation comes as the agency faces criticism on multiple fronts.
“Frankly, I’m not surprised,” Dr. Demetre Daskalakis said when asked if he was surprised by Dr. Shuford’s resignation. Dr. Daskalakis who resigned last year as the CDC’s top immunization official. “I worked with Dr. Shuford when I was the head of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, when she was in Texas as the state health official. And she is an excellent infectious disease doctor and a very strong public health leader. So, I was more surprised that she joined the CDC given the current environment.”
Dr. Daskalakis is now chief medical officer for Callen-Lorde in New York City.
6 questions with Dr. Demetre Daskalakis
Dr. Shuford was praised during her time in Texas for the way she handled the measles outbreak there. She was also a proponent of childhood vaccines in that job. What does the CDC lose by losing her?
“I mean, I think she is the only qualified person in the office of the director. I think that the director does have qualifications but seemingly is not being really allowed to speak or actually interact on very important topics. So, when I think about who’s left in the office of the director, it’s a lot of political operatives. And I think Jen was really Dr. Shuford was, I think, the last one in there that, in my opinion, was strong from the perspective of actual public health chops.”
The current director, Dr. Erica Schwartz, is still in the job. Are you saying you don’t have faith in her to do it?
“I don’t have faith in her ability to, you know, be a fully realized public health professional. That plane is hijacked. And I hope that she is not one of the hijackers. But either way, it seems as if, you know, we’re not seeing from the CDC the communication that we’re used to seeing. We’re not seeing the science that we’re used to seeing. And we’re seeing things like, you know, promotion of vaccines to pregnant people that don’t actually mention the word vaccine. And so, um, you know, this is not what I would expect of a CDC director. I would expect a lot more.”
We did reach out to the CDC for comment. We haven’t heard back yet. Dr. Shuford says she wants to spend more time with family, but this is just the latest high-profile departure of what has become, as you’ve pointed out already, a very politicized agency. How much and how specifically has the CDC changed in recent years?
“When you think about – let’s start with the office of the director, it was often one or two political appointees and then career scientists. So right now, there are over 20 political appointees there, and very few, if none, from the perspective of career scientists. So that is a very big change.
“I think the other thing is that CDC routinely leans forward when it needs to message. So, you know, thinking about some of the outbreaks that we’ve seen, with the cryptosporidium outbreak that we had earlier in the year, I think it’s shocking that we didn’t really hear that much from CDC.
“When you think about measles, we’re not hearing things from the CDC every day or every week. When I was there for measles, when I was there for bird flu, we would have, you know, press availabilities almost every week so that we could be very transparent about what’s happening and also give the press and the public the opportunity to hear from us directly. So, this is not the CDC that I know.”
Are those political reasons that we’re not hearing from the CDC, or is it because apparently 2000 staff members have lost their jobs since 2025?
“You know, I think that there’s a couple of reasons. I mean, I hazard a guess that a lot of this is political. I think that the desire to not have a CDC voice out there and a science voice out there really makes it easier for the forces internal to HHS to continue to destroy CDC. So, I think that this is strategic.”
What are the real-world consequences of what we’re talking about? There’s a measles outbreak here in this country, an Ebola outbreak in Africa.
“I think the reality is that the narrative goes wild if there’s not a public health voice that people can trust. And so, CDC, though not perfect, has been very good at leaning forward and communicating about what we know and what we don’t know, so that there is an anchor around which people can understand some of the health challenges that are facing the country. Without that anchor, things keep mushrooming. Stories go out of control. It is confusing to public health officials and also confusing to people.”
What about for state and local governments, which have traditionally relied on expertise from the CDC?
“I think one of the things that we’re seeing is the state and local governments are banding together in regional organizations because they have to really fend for themselves. A lot of the messaging that we traditionally saw from the CDC has really waned. And, you know, that means that folks are on their own. The reality is not every state is the same. Some are very resourced to do public health, and some aren’t. So that means that the haves are able to communicate very effectively, and the have-nots are sometimes stuck looking for some sort of source that they can trust.”
This interview was edited for clarity.
Thomas Danielian produced this interview for broadcast with Michael Scotto. Scotto adapted it for web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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