‘There Are Layers of Mistrust and Fear’

The editorial board and our colleagues in Times Opinion met on Monday with Dr. Mandy Cohen, who became the director for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last year. Dr. Cohen was the top public health official in North Carolina during the Covid pandemic, winning praise for working with Gov. Roy Cooper to steer the state’s response without allowing it to become politicized.

She wants the C.D.C. to be prepared for the next big public health challenge “in a disease-agnostic way,” rather than focusing on a specific threat, like avian flu, dengue or an as yet unknown pathogen. We also talked to her about how to address Americans’ persistent mistrust of big institutions and how the 2024 presidential election might affect her future and that of the roughly 13,000 employees she leads.

Following is an edited transcript of the conversation.

Mandy Cohen: I thought I would start by just doing a quick “What do we focus on for 2024 at C.D.C.?” The first is to be ready to respond no matter the health threat — that might be something like avian flu or it might be something like drowning.

So we’re spending a lot of time making sure that we are having the core capabilities, the data infrastructure and laboratory capability, the talented work force, and the response capability to actually respond. And that is different from what the agency has done in the past. We are really planning as one team in a disease-agnostic way.

The two other areas of focus are where we’re just seeing a lot of challenges. One is making sure we’re improving mental health. We lost over 100,000 people to overdose and more than 50,000 to suicide just last year. And so we’re wanting to make sure we’re bringing our data and expertise and our investments to bear on that issue.

And the last place of focus is supporting young families. C.D.C.’s known for responding to things like viruses, but the C.D.C. has a really big focus on protecting health and improving lives globally. And that means thinking about starting as early as we can to make sure that folks are setting their lifelong health patterns.