Who is Mandy Cohen?
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention appears to have brought in another career bureaucrat to run the organization. And this time, the new director earned her most recent stripes as the secretary of the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services.
Dr. Mandy Cohen was tapped recently as the new director of the Centers for Disease Control. She assumed her new position on July 11, 2023. Most North Carolinians had probably never heard her name until Covid lockdowns in the spring of 2020. She became a regular face on the television during that time to provide an update on Covid case numbers, Covid deaths and even reporting on the percentage of people compliantly wearing their face masks throughout the state. It was during this time that Facebook exploded with a video showing Mandy Cohen walking out for her press conference without a mask, hastily applying it to her face, and then quickly removing it as she sat down. This footage was not shocking to Covid lockdown skeptics, but it certainly solidified in the minds of many that Mandy Cohen didn’t believe what she was authoritatively dictating to the masses.
Most North Carolina residents had never heard of Mandy Cohen because she didn’t move to North Carolina until 2017 when she was appointed by Governor Roy Cooper as the head of North Carolina Health and Human Services. According to a recent CNN article, Cooper said, “We coaxed her to come to North Carolina” and that it may have been the first time she’d ever set foot in the state.
Mandy Cohen was born in 1979 and raised on Long Island, NY. Her mother was an emergency room nurse, and her father was a junior high school guidance counselor. After graduating high school she began her Ivy League trifecta journey. She attended Cornell University, and in 2000 earned a bachelor’s degree in policy analysis and management. Her next stop was Yale University where she received her medical degree. While completing her residency at Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. Cohen attended Harvard University where she attained a master’s degree in public health.
Based on Dr. Cohen’s career path, it seems clear that seeing patients was never in her plans. Before graduating from medical school in 2005 she was already consulting with the director of the MD/MBA program at Yale, Dr. Howard Forman, regarding her future career. According to Forman, “She had come with very specific ambitions…She saw a broken healthcare system and she saw a role for federal and state government in fixing that.”
In addition to getting her master’s degree during her residency she also served on committees for primary care, quality assurance, and recruitment. She became the Co-Director for the Health Policy Elective during this time and the northeast representative for the American College of Physicians’ National Council of Associates.
Cohen left Mass General in 2008 and immediately entered the public sector. She became the Deputy Director of Comprehensive Women’s Health Services at the Department of Veterans Affairs. A year later she became the Executive Director of a non-profit called Doctors for America, which had previously been known as Doctors for Obama. The purpose of this group was to recruit doctors who publicly supported Obamacare and health care reform. While executive director, Cohen focused on Medicaid expansion, Medicaid legislation, and curbing gun violence. Doctors for America is now also focused on abortion rights and gender affirming care. In 2010, Cohen joined the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) as an advisor and moved her way up through the ranks. She was in charge of fixing the broken Healthcare.gov website when its launch failed in 2013. In 2015 Cohen was promoted to chief of staff to the administrator of CMS and subsequently named chief operating officer seven months later.
Cohen was serving as COO at CMS when Roy Cooper came calling. Dr. Cohen served as secretary of NC Department of Health and Human Services from January 2017 until the end of 2021.
She was there to oversee the Covid era and became a household name and recognizable face to those who turned on the television during that time. She was a strong advocate for Covid restrictions, speaking almost daily about the need to mask and then strongly encouraging NC residents to take the Covid vaccines. In September of 2021, Dr. Cohen wrote a letter to the Union County Board of Education threatening legal action against them if they didn’t rescind a motion passed in an 8-1 vote to “immediately end staff responsibility for contact tracing and quarantine operations for any asymptomatic or non-positive students and staff.” She stated in that letter, "If Union County public schools do not take such steps by September 17th[sic], legal action may be required to protect the public's health."
After leaving her post as secretary of NCHHS on January 1, 2022, Mandy Cohen entered the private sector briefly in March of 2022 to become the CEO of Adelade Care Solutions, a primary care enablement company. She was there just over a year before she had to divest of her shares in the company, in order to assume her position as director of the CDC.
What kind of leadership can the citizens of the United States expect from the new CDC director? Based on Mandy Cohen’s academic background and career to date, it will most likely be a leadership of federal dictates and top down orders. The autonomy of the individual states will probably be treated like that of the Union County Board of Education. During a Q&A held at Duke University in May 2022 Cohen spoke about her frequent conversations with the Secretary of Health and Human Services in Massachusetts during Covid. She recounted a conversation with her Massachusetts counterpart in which she was asked, “Are you going to LET them have professional football? And I was like, nope. And she was like, okay, neither are we. Neither are we… And I’d be like, so when are you gonna think about lightening up on masks? She’d be like, next Monday. Okay, next Monday.” These are not the musings of a leader who believes in convincing those she’s leading to follow her. These are the musings of someone who believes her position alone gives her free reign to control the behavior of others.