The nomination of a new leader for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — one who has scientific credentials and no public ties to the anti-vaccine movement — has generated sighs of relief in the public health world.
As one CDC employee, who asked not to be named, put it on Friday, among staff “the general vibe is guarded but hopeful.”
Still, even people who are applauding the choice of Erica Schwartz, a retired rear admiral in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, are worried about whether she’s up for the challenges ahead.
Schwartz’s predecessor, Susan Monarez, was fired after a standoff with health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on vaccine policy. One sign of her tenuous position: during her brief tenure, Monarez tried to move a political appointee she had not hired out of her office, to a different floor. Her decision was overruled.
Circumstances have changed in the months since Monarez’s ouster. Kennedy is being pressured to sideline his pursuit of vaccine policy changes. Some of his supporters are questioning the choice of Schwartz as CDC director, who received a strong — if somewhat qualified — endorsement from her former boss, Jerome Adams, surgeon general in the first Trump administration.
“She has the expertise, credibility, and integrity to lead the CDC effectively,” Adams wrote on social media. “If allowed to follow the science without political interference, she’ll excel.”
Adams declined to be interviewed about Schwartz. In a statement, Department of Health and Human Services spokespearson Rich Danker said “Dr. Schwartz is a physician, public health expert, and veteran who is eminently qualified to lead the CDC in its mission of protecting America from infectious disease threats.”
Experts worry Schwartz’s fate could be similar to that of Monarez: another person who understands how government is supposed to function and has a background in making science-based decisions given a job she isn’t allowed to do.
Others are worried that with her long history in the military — Schwartz served in the Navy and the Coast Guard — she will follow orders, even if it means putting in place policies that are not backed by science.
“It’s not about her. It’s about what the secretary’s going to do,” Daniel Jernigan, a former CDC center director who quit in protest of Monarez’s firing, told STAT. “She could be terrible, she could be great. But it’s really: What is the secretary going to allow?”
Abby Tighe, a former CDC employee who lost her job in the first round of cuts at the agency in February 2025, said she was encouraged to see someone with relevant credentials nominated to run the agency. But she remains skeptical.
“After what happened with Dr. Monarez, I am most concerned that Dr. Schwartz has been chosen by this administration to rubber stamp misinformation and bad health policy,” said Tighe, one of the founders of the National Public Health Coalition, formerly known as Fired But Fighting.
“I deeply hope that is not how things shake out, but it is hard to trust a nominee from this administration, no matter how qualified, after the year and half of trauma and turmoil at the CDC,” she said.
Jernigan interacted with Schwartz during the Covid-19 pandemic, when she, as deputy surgeon general in the first Trump administration, was tasked with standing up public testing facilities for Covid, the tents and drive-throughs that were ubiquitous in the early months of the pandemic. “She really jumped into it and took it on and made it happen,” he said.
An individual who was a member of the transition team for the Biden administration recalled dealing with Schwartz, who was the designated HHS liaison for the first Trump administration.
“She was the point person and essentially, the choke point, making it difficult to set up meetings and get information,” said the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “She was an intentional bottleneck that prevented the new team from getting basic information about how the department was operating.”
That experience is unlikely to assuage concerns over whether she will have the inclination or the clout to stand up to Kennedy, if the need arises.
Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security, said that while Schwartz has a CV that seems in alignment with the mission of the CDC, she’ll be merely “window dressing” if she isn’t given autonomy from Kennedy. He suggested she should have demanded that before agreeing to take the job.
Reporting in The Washington Post suggested that several candidates fell out of consideration for the position when they made such demands, with one in particular asking for the kind of hiring and firing powers enjoyed by Mehmet Oz, director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Still, The Post reported that Schwartz would have “a free hand” to run the CDC.
Officials on the search committee were focused on finding a nominee who could actually be confirmed, according to people familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
There have been conflicting recent signs from the administration about its position on key public health questions such as vaccination policy, and the independence of the CDC in general.
Polling commissioned by the White House shows that Kennedy’s erosion of vaccination policy is unpopular among Republicans as well as Democrats. Word from the White House has been that it has done what it set out to do on vaccination policy, and that Kennedy should be focusing on more popular aspects of his agenda in the lead up to November’s midterm elections.
But actions speak louder than words, and there is recent evidence that draws into question how hard the White House is trying to rein in Kennedy.
After a federal court issued a preliminary ruling last month that the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices — a group appointed by Kennedy, after he summarily fired the previous body — was not staffed by people with adequate credentials for the job, the ACIP’s charter was rewritten.
The new version, published last week, dilutes the types of expertise required to sit on the panel and refocuses its mandate away from the effective use of vaccines, towards study of their purported harms.
The same day the new charter was published, The Post reported that Jay Bhattacharya, head of the National Institutes of Health and de facto acting director of the CDC, delayed publication of a study showing the effectiveness of Covid vaccines in protecting against serious illness and hospitalization.
An HHS spokesperson confirmed the report to the news outlet, saying Bhattacharya had concerns about the methodology used in the study, even though it is one that is standard.
Another challenge will face Schwartz if she is confirmed by the Senate. The director’s office has become a repository for political appointees, most of whom have no public health experience or medical credentials. A number either ran unsuccessfully for office as Republicans, or worked on a GOP electoral campaign. Some are anti-vaccine figures.
For most of its history, the CDC had one political appointee, the director. Prior to this week there were an estimated 18 political appointees folded into the agency in the past 15 months; three more were added Thursday in conjunction with the announcement of Schwartz’s nomination, replacing individuals like former Louisiana Surgeon General Ralph Abraham, who left the CDC after less than two months on the job, and Lynda Chapman, who is moving to a new role at HHS.
Those are Sean Slovenski, a former president of Walmart Health & Wellness, as CDC deputy director and chief operating officer; Jennifer Shuford, Texas state health commissioner and infectious diseases physician, who will serve as a deputy director and chief medical officer; and Sara Brenner, principal deputy commissioner at the Food and Drug Administration, who will be a senior counselor for public health to Kennedy.
Phil Huang, health director for the city of Dallas, said Texas will be sad to lose Shuford, but that she’s a great choice for the job due to her strong public health background, including managing the pandemic and expressing support for vaccination — so long as she “gets the support she needs.”
What that would look like he says, “if [the new appointees] say, here’s what we need to do for public health, that they’re trusted for their expertise” by senior HHS leadership.
It’s not clear if Schwartz had any say in the hiring of those three. And it remains to be seen if she will be given authority to prune the ranks of the political appointees who were previously appointed — and if she’d choose to do so if empowered.
That’s important because the existence of that group conveys a message to staff about who is really in charge at the agency.
“There are still people in that office, like Stuart Burns, that I personally think do not have the agency’s best interest at heart,” said Jernigan. “And until they’re gone, they’re going to run into trouble.”
“The names have been put forward are good,” he continued. “But the landscape has not changed, and we’re just adding more politicals [appointees] to it.”
