CDC director overhauls leadership of center that oversaw response to Covid-19

The new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Mandy Cohen, is overhauling the leadership of the CDC center that led the agency’s Covid-19 response.

In an announcement to staff issued Tuesday, Cohen said José Romero, who headed the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases for the past 14 months, would be leaving the CDC at the end of August.

“I want to thank him for his service to this agency and our country,” Cohen said in the memo to staff, a copy of which was obtained by STAT.

Replacing Romero, at least on an acting basis, is Demetre Daskalakis, who has spent the past year in Washington as deputy director of the White House’s national mpox response team. The White House operation is being wound down and will be completed by the end of August.

Daskalakis, who has spent much of his career working on HIV prevention and control, was director of the CDC’s Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention in the National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention. For much of 2021, he led the CDC’s Covid-19 vaccine task force.

Romero, who was Arkansas’ secretary of health from 2020 to 2022, joined the CDC in June 2022 in the center director role. Previously he served on, and was chair of, the CDC’s expert vaccine panel, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.

Two other high-ranking officials in NCIRD are being moved to other centers within the agency. Sam Posner, who served as acting director of the center in the second year of the pandemic, and has been principal deputy director since Romero’s hiring, is going to be acting director of the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control.

At NCIRD, Posner had replaced Nancy Messonnier, who ran afoul of the Trump administration early in the pandemic when she publicly warned in early March 2020 that the rapidly spreading virus was going to dramatically change lives. Messonnier left the CDC in the spring of 2021 and is now the dean of the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina.

Kristin Pope, deputy director of NCIRD, is going to the new Center for Forecasting and Analytics.