NC health care professionals contend new CDC Director incapable of rebuilding trust | Eastern North Carolina Now

By Matt McGregor, Reporter writing at The Epoch Times  

In her new position as Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director, the former North Carolina Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. Mandy Cohen said she intends to rebuild trust in the public.

However, medical professionals in the state—in recalling her actions during the pandemic—say that won’t happen.

In an interview with NPR, Dr. Cohen said, “Trust is a critical foundation for a healthy society. Trust in institutions, such as government, or media, or business, has been eroding in recent years. This lack of trust has led to polarization, to division.”

Dr. Cohen outlined three steps to mend the relationship between the CDC and the public, the first being transparency.

“We’re having clear communications that are simple and accurate, that folks can understand, that they know that there are common sense solutions for them to protect their health,” Dr. Cohen said. “And the second is making sure that we execute or have good performance in what the CDC is meant to do. And so, making sure that we are doing what we say we’re going to do.”

Third, Dr. Cohen said she intends to build relationships and partnerships.

“Protecting the health of this country is a team sport,” she said.

Though NPR carried water for federal agencies and the pharmaceutical industry, it acknowledged—at the very least—CDC’s conflicting information.

“I’m wondering if you think that instead public health officials should sometimes say, ‘We don’t know the answer,’ NPR asked.

Dr. Cohen gave the pat “science-changes” response, stating, “I think it’s important to be clear about what you know, what you don’t know, and what you’re working on. Science and data is going to be constantly evolving.”

Her focus this fall, despite the multitude of concerns the COVID-19 vaccines have raised, is not to address those concerns but to continue to promote vaccinations.

Dr. Cohen recently told Spectrum News that the CDC would probably be coming out with guidance in the fall for annual COVID-19 boosters.

“We’re just on the precipice of that, so I don’t want to get ahead of where our scientists are here and doing that evaluation work, but yes, we anticipate that COVID will become similar to flu shots, where it is going to be you get your annual flu shot, and you get your annual COVID shot,” she said. “We’re not quite there yet but stay tuned. I think within the next couple of weeks, month we’re going to hear more from our experts on COVID shots.”

She went on to state that she’s concerned about vaccine distrust.

“I’m very worried about parents not vaccinating kids,” she said. “I got my kids vaccinated from the circulating viruses. There’s plenty of other things that are hard as parents that we can’t do. This is one we can do to protect our kids.”

‘Unfit for the Position’

Her comment on making the COVID-19 vaccine an annual shot drew the concern of Ohio Congressman and physician Brad Wenstrup, the Republican chairman of the subcommittee who has launched an investigation into how federal agencies carried out the “coercive policies” of Biden administration’s vaccine mandates.

On August 2, Dr. Wenstrup sent a letter (pdf) to Dr. Cohen stating that it’s “unclear if the science supports such a recommendation,” adding that it marks “a significant change in policy.”

To “better understand this potential decision,” Dr. Wenstrup requested a communications and document request to be sent by Aug. 16, 2023.

In July, three days before Cohen was sworn in to succeed Rochelle Walensky, 22 Republican House members and six Republican senators issued a joint statement (pdf) to President Joe Biden urging him not to appoint her as director, calling her “unfit for the position.”

“Throughout her career, Dr. Cohen has politized science, disregarded civil liberties, and spread misinformation about the efficacy and necessity of COVID vaccinations and the necessity of masks during her time as Secretary of the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services,” the letter stated. “She also has a history of engaging in partisan left-wing politics.”

The letter alluded to “a North Carolina school district” that refused to comply with Dr. Cohen’s “largely hysterical quarantine policies,” which resulted in her threatening to bring legal action against the district.

“Dr. Cohen’s willingness to threaten the school district put politics over the well-being of children and is just another example of the litany of public health abuses the American people endured at the hands of bureaucrats throughout the COVID-19 pandemic,” the letter stated.

Union County Public Schools

The school district Dr. Cohen threatened was Union County Public Schools (UCPS), which, in the fall of 2021, refused the state’s mandate for school districts to mandate masks.

The Union County Board of Education faced heated criticism for voting to keep masks optional in July of that year, which continued as it stood its ground on the issue.

Throughout this time, the district saw decreasing cases as it stayed the course on mask optional.

Instead of acknowledging the district for its decreasing cases, Dr. Cohen sent a letter (pdf) warning UCPS Chair Melissa Merrell that she would take legal action if it didn’t reverse its vote in September 2021.

“This honestly made me laugh because not only were our COVID [cases] decreasing, but we were also just named the number one performing school district in North Carolina,” Ms. Merrell told The Epoch Times in 2021.

‘Gut it From the Top Down’

Brandi Smith is a nurse in Union County who sits on the advisory board for the North Carolina Physicians for Freedom.

She worked on the frontlines of COVID while feeding data to Merrell and the board of education, she said, “so they had facts to stand on.”

“Gov. Roy Cooper’s mask mandate for the state expired that summer, so 55 schools voted for mask optional,” Ms. Smith said. “Cooper did not like that, so he sent a letter to all 55 schools. Fifty of those schools rescinded their mask mandate. That left five of us.”

That’s when Dr. Cohen stepped in and changed the quarantine rules for mask-optional schools, making it more difficult for them, Ms. Smith said.

“This hurt our children excessively,” Ms. Smith said. “The new guidelines sent thousands more home than they would have if masks were required.”

In one week, there were over 7,000 teachers and students out because of the quarantine rules Dr. Cohen put on mask-optional schools.

Ms. Smith’s own daughter had to quarantine for 14 days because she was in class with a student who tested positive, she said, even though she tested negative.

“That’s a big problem for working parents,” Ms. Smith said.

Though local public health officials didn’t agree with what Dr. Cohen and Gov. Cooper were doing, they “were too scared to speak up,” Ms. Smith said.

“But not Melissa Merrell,” Ms. Smith said. “She went head-to-head and didn’t hesitate to stand up for the kids and parents of Union County.”

All the while, COVID cases in the district were lower than they were in other districts in the state, yet Dr. Cohen denied UCPS’s request to decrease the days required for quarantine.

In the face of the threat of litigation, Ms. Smith said, Ms. Merrell “called their bluff.”

With no facts, data, or studies on their side, Dr. Cohen, she said, “had no leg to stand on.”

On her stated goal to reestablish trust with the public, Ms. Smith said, “I just don’t think it’s possible.”

“For three years, I watched people die who didn’t have to die because these institutions like the CDC,” Ms. Smith said. “They put profit over patients and put things into place that had no scientific data or evidence to support it. They lied on numerous occasions.”

The ramifications of what Ms. Smith called its “dictatorship” continue to reverberate through the lives of those who got caught in the web of its conflicting narratives, narratives to which Dr. Cohen contributed, she said.

“I don’t know how the CDC would come back from this,” Ms. Smith said. “I say gut it. Gut it from the top down. Mandy Cohen will never build the trust back with the CDC. She was a part of the problem on a local level, and now they just gave her more power.”

‘The Antithesis of Transparency’

The policies Dr. Joseph Guarino in Reidsville, North Carolina, observed throughout the pandemic contradicted what he learned when he studied public health.

“When the lockdowns began, and I saw what Dr. Cohen was doing in this state, I thought, ‘Gee, I don’t remember any of this in my training,” he told The Epoch Times.

He even pulled out his old textbooks to confirm, he said.

“I can tell you that everything she did was, for the most, part wrong,” Dr. Guarino said. “And she did it without a whole lot of opposition, even though Republicans controlled the state legislature there.”

Dr. Guarino doesn’t think there will be much of a difference in how she’ll operate on a federal level, he said, pointing to her floating the annual COVID-19 vaccine.

“The field of public health has a fairly defined set of ethical ground rules and a set of best practices that practitioners are supposed to follow, and when you look at those individual pieces, Dr. Cohen failed pretty much every single one,” Dr. Guarino said. “As a result, there was a massive violation of public health ethics, and a lot of people got hurt in a lot of different ways.”

On whether Dr. Cohen can rebuild trust, Dr. Guarino said it could only be done “by deception and untruth.”

“If she does on a national level what she did here, it means she would be ingratiating herself with the Republican legislators, charming and deceiving them while giving the appearance of being transparent when she’s really not being transparent,” Dr. Guarino said.

There’s an ethical requirement to be transparent about the ground rules for public health, which he said didn’t take place in the state or federal government.

The most blatant lack of transparency was when federal agencies and pharmaceutical companies covered up the adverse reactions from the vaccines, yet continued to push them without giving informed consent.

“That’s really the antithesis of transparency,” he said.

Inconsistent Narratives

Retired pediatrician Dr. Bose Ravenel shared Dr. Guarino’s view.

Dr. Ravenel has up to 5,000 hours of studying COVID, and what he witnessed during the pandemic was a deviation from basic commonsense practices on the part of Dr. Cohen and other public health officials, he said.

“In her tenure as HHS secretary, the governor’s office repeatedly produced narratives that weren’t consistent with the actual published studies when analyzed carefully,” Dr. Ravenel said. “Under her leadership, the narratives that we were given were misleading and went unsupported by rigorous scientific study.”

On whether Dr. Cohen can gain the trust back of the public as CDC director, Dr. Ravenel answered, “No, absolutely not. The regulators have been in a revolving door with Big Pharma positions.”

The Epoch Times contacted the CDC for comment.

Ross Muscato and Zachary Stieber contributed to this report.