Congress members question CDC Director Cohen on "trust" in her agency
Questioning included pandemic responses and the Chinese Biolab in California
On Nov. 30, the House Energy Committee's subcommittee on Oversight And Investigations held a hearing titled, “Unmasking Challenges CDC Faces In Rebuilding Public Trust Amid Respiratory Illness Season.”
The hearing was announced on Nov. 21 and new CDC Director Mandy Cohen was the only witness called.
The memo issued for the hearing gave an overview of the topics, including “the return of respiratory disease season with its anticipated increased spread of influenza, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), and COVID-19.”
“This year, it comes as a critical test for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as the CDC seeks to build back public trust following well-documented mistakes during the COVID-19 pandemic and while the agency is still engaged in its “Moving Forward” reform effort,” the memo states.
The memo also describes the CDC as currently going through a "reorganization" which is "an attempt to fix shortcomings and failures identified during the COVID-19 pandemic."
This reorganization has three parts which include streamlining decision-making processes, enhancing data collection and analysis capabilities, and improving coordination with state and local health departments.
The memo makes a dig at the CDC's over the "secret" reorganization.
"Whether these reforms, which have largely been carried out in secret and without input from Congress, the American people, or even external stakeholders, will be successful remains to be seen,” the memo says.
Cohen's bio posted for the hearing includes her role as North Carolina's Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (NCDHHS), describing her as being "lauded for her outstanding leadership during the COVID crisis, focusing on equity, data accountability, and transparent communication."
Cohen read prepared remarks, opening with the idea the CDC had been the leading health agency for 80 years and that "we need a CDC that is trusted."
Her remarks centered mainly on using "what the CDC learned during COVID-19" when dealing with "rapid detection and response" to emerging health threats.
Similar to the work she did at NCDHHS, Cohen said the CDC is "leveraging our surveillance networks and laboratory capacity to rapidly detect changes in both the circulating flu virus and SARS-COV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19."
"This month, CDC announced a new pilot that will expand our Travelerbased Genomic Surveillance (TGS) program, which acts as an early warning system to detect new and rare variants of certain infectious diseases and fill gaps in global surveillance, especially where testing and reporting are limited,” said Cohen. “The program consists of voluntary nasal sampling of arriving international travelers, and aircraft and airport wastewater sampling."
When it came to respiratory illnesses, Cohen stressed vaccinations.
“Vaccination against COVID-19, flu, and RSV remains the safest protection for avoiding hospitalizations, long-term health impacts, and death,” Cohen said. “CDC continues to encourage Americans to stay up to date on all of their recommended vaccinations. This is a top priority for CDC, and there is good news: for the first time ever, immunizations are available for all three major fall and winter respiratory diseases."
Cohen added that in addition to RSV vaccinations, the CDC “recommended the updated COVID-19 vaccine for everyone 6 months and older."
"The COVID-19 vaccines approved and authorized for use in the United States continue to reduce the risk of severe disease, hospitalization, and death, including against the most common variants currently circulating."
"Getting a COVID-19 vaccine is a safer, more reliable way to build protection than getting sick with COVID-19, which can potentially lead to severe illness or post-COVID conditions (also known as Long COVID),” said Cohen.”
Cohen did not address hospitalizations and deaths being identified as having been caused by the vaccine but instead cited COVID-19 shots as preventing “18.5 million COVID-19 hospitalizations and 3.2 million COVID-19 deaths in the United States” by the end of 2022.
In a video published in mid-September, Cohen urged everyone six months and up to get a COVID booster.
She then went on to talk for some time about the importance of free vaccine programs for the uninsured instituted under the Biden administration, data use and sharing agreements with state and tribal jurisdictions, and the CDC's new "Respiratory Virus Data Channel."
Before Cohen gave her prepared remarks, New Jersey Democrat Rep. Frank Pallone defended the CDC, and its funding reauthorization, and described the pandemic as "bipartisan."
Despite the increasing mountain of evidence masks were ineffective in preventing COVID-19 transmission, Pallone also took a shot at those across the aisle by saying the title of the hearing shows Republicans "have disdain for masks."
House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers also made a statement.
“I want to welcome and congratulate, Dr. Cohen, on her appointment as Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,” said Rodgers. “We must have a transparent and honest conversation about the future of the CDC—an agency that has never been, but needs to be, authorized by Congress."
Rodgers went on to say, “Director Cohen, you might be the last appointed CDC Director without a Senate confirmation. Your actions and decisions can help return the CDC back to its fundamental mission or your actions could allow the CDC to drift further away and worsen public trust.”
“This is a chance to restore transparency and public trust in our health institutions and ensure that the CDC’s issued guidance is clear, practical, and consistently relevant and up to date with the latest science,” said Rodgers. “Sometimes, this may include telling the American people what the CDC does and doesn’t know.”
“To put this bluntly, your predecessors took bad advice. They acted on bad advice due to political pressure and misled the American people. The institution you now run influenced schools to remain closed by listening to non-scientific stakeholders, namely Teachers’ Unions,” Rodgers said. “And because of the guidance to keep schools closed for an extended period, our children—the very future of our country—now suffer generational learning loss and devastating mental health conditions.”
“Director Cohen, you have an opportunity today to inform the committee—and the American people—how you plan to lead as Director,” Rodgers said in closing.
Watch Rodgers’ opening remarks:
House Energy and Commerce Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee Chair Morgan Griffith (R-VA) also gave an opening statement.
“Today’s hearing is the first opportunity for Congress to hear testimony from Dr. Mandy Cohen since she was appointed the CDC, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Director in July,” said Griffith. “Dr. Cohen, congratulations on your appointment. You are taking the reins of the CDC at a critical time in the agency’s history and you have a heavy task ahead.”
Griffith said he was interested to see how Cohen would handle winter respiratory illnesses and said “Questions remain” about how the CDC will rebuild trust, what the CDC learned from its pandemic mistakes, and what reforms were being taken to avoid repeating those mistakes.
“While I’m looking forward to hearing your testimony on these points, I candidly haven’t seen much outward evidence yet that the CDC has taken the failings of the COVID-19 pandemic to heart,” Griffith said.”
Griffith also hit on school closures before criticizing the CDC's response to the illegal Chinese biolab discovered in California.
“The damage wrought by school closures was enormous and our children will be living with its consequences for decades,” said Griffith before turning to address the illegal biolab in California which he said also “exposed more problems with the CDC.”
Griffith commented that the CDC’s management of the Federal Select Agent Program has “been subject to criticism in the past for inadequate investigations in response to biosecurity incidents, including investigations from this subcommittee.”
“Reading the China Select Committee’s report showed how inadequate CDC’s approach to the Select Agent Program is,” Griffith said. “ [The] CDC initially refused to even investigate the lab and only did so once they were contacted by Democratic Representative Jim Costa from California.”
“The CDC even refused to test any of the thousands of pathogen samples that could have contained unknown and dangerous pathogens,” Griffith continued. “The agency also failed to take meaningful action regarding a refrigerator that was labeled 'Ebola' during their so-called 'investigation.'
The Virginia lawmaker then said the CDC’s response was “totally inadequate and failed to provide any support for the local government and put the public at risk through its indifference.”
“As we look to the future, it’s clear that the CDC needs more than a reset. There needs to be a seismic shift,” Griffith said in closing. “I know that you have not been there long enough to implement a seismic shift, but I hope we can start to see CDC guidance driven by the latest science and robust evidence.”
Watch Griffith’s opening remarks below:
During questioning, Cohen said the CDC was concentrating their communications efforts on healthcare providers and doctors, particularly when it comes to getting vaccinated.
"One of the top reasons people don't get vaccinated is because their doctor or nurse practitioner just didn't bring it up," Cohen claimed. She added that "real-time data" is extremely important before stating that when she was head of North Carolina's health department, "we used data day to day" in making daily decisions.
The data and metrics transmission of cases, deaths, and testing to the CDC during Cohen's term at NCDHHS had issues; often lagged by weeks or had to be corrected, and in some cases, the CDC dashboards showed certain NC data to be completely missing. Throughout the pandemic, NCDHHS also altered the state dashboards regularly, making it hard to track recovery, death, and case data.
South Carolina Republican Rep. Jeffrey Duncan questioned old laws used by the CDC to force masking, social distancing, and closure of businesses and churches across the country, while highlighting the same approaches were not applied to protests and riots.
Several members of the committee mentioned or questioned how the CDC was communicating with the public, however, none of the members directly asked about the reports of the Biden administration, including the CDC, engaging in censorship of Americans on social media platforms that occurred during the pandemic.
The closest the committee came to asking about censorship was a question from Michigan's Democratic Rep. Deborah Dingell, who asked Cohen how her agency was "combating misinformation."
Cohen said the best way to combat misinformation was "to get a whole lot of the good information out there" and to "partner with folks who are trusted."
Cohen did mention they had a new leader for their communications department but did not name that person.
Alabama Republican Rep. Gary Palmer wasted no time and asked Cohen directly about COVID-19 policy.
"Would you have shut down the schools? Would you have closed the schools?" Palmer asked. "Is that what you did in North Carolina?"
"Well, sir, yes," Cohen replied. "Back in 2020, all the schools across the entire country were shut down, including North Carolina."
Cohen began to say she "worked across the aisle" before Palmer interrupted her and asked her if she had been in charge of the CDC during the pandemic whether or not she would have closed schools or if another pandemic were to happen while in charge of the CDC if she would take the same course of action.
"Well, the good news is we are in a different place than we were before," said Cohen. "We have different tools and different mechanisms to respond." She went on to say she "can't really address the hypothetical" but felt a lot had been learned from the pandemic response.
Palmer pressed Cohen, asking "Did it harm our students by shutting down the schools?"
Cohen deflected a bit, noting in-person instruction is known to be "highly beneficial" before Palmer cut her off, telling Cohen she would "be great in a sales department."
"I am trying to get to policy and that [school closures] is one of the key things that troubles us about the CDC," Palmer said.
Palmer turned to masking, reminding Cohen the CDC insisted on masking children as young as two while the CDC was "making the argument there was no disagreement" about the policy. Palmer held up a report he said detailed "widespread disagreement" on masking both in Europe and the United States.
"What would your position be on that?" Palmer asked Cohen about masking.
"Well, it's good that we are in a different place and we are able to turn a chapter forward," Cohen said without directly answering the question. "We have a lot of different tools to protect our children now - vaccines and treatment."
Cohen then went on to say “Masks continue to be one tool amongst many to protect our children."
"So you would continue to require masking for two-year-old kids?" Palmer asked.
Cohen, again, did not answer directly, stating instead that "we are in a very different place."
Cohen, who was tapped for CDC director by President Biden in June 2023, was a big proponent of wearing a mask during her term as secretary of NCDHHS and came with credibility issues of her own.
Following her appointment announcement Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) posted on X with a video mocking Cohen as Biden’s "Masking Queen.”
“She's laughed off lockdowns, fangirled about Fauci, pushed mask mandates on school kids, and supported more government control over your life and health decisions,” Cruz wrote. “She's wholly unfit to lead the CDC.”
Cruz’s post referring to Cohen “fangirling” over Fauci is likely a reference to an old post that Cohen made on X that included a photo of herself wearing a “Fauci mask.”
Cruz’s mention of Cohen laughing about lockdowns tracks back to an incident before her appointment was official. On June 1, 2023, a video surfaced of Cohen laughing about how she decided on pandemic policies, which consisted of calling colleagues in other states to ask what they were doing. The video quickly made its way to national outlets like the NY Post.
On another occasion, Cohen was caught on video pretending to wear a mask as she headed up to the podium to deliver a pandemic briefing in July 2020.
Palmer pressed the topic, noting a lot of people felt masking was more about power than it was about medicine.
He also told Cohen it was going to be difficult for Congress to "get on board" with the CDC if the organization did not make significant policy changes and if Cohen continued to give "sales job" responses because "people don't trust you anymore.
More To The Story
Cohen was grilled on the CDC's credibility and was asked point blank about the discovery of an illegal Chinese biolab operating in California by Republican Rep. Dan Crenshaw of Texas. His questioning began just before the 2-hour mark.
I echo what my colleague Rep. Palmer said, if the CDC wants its credibility back, you've got to have a mea culpa moment," said Crenshaw. "You are in the perfect position to do it because you had nothing to do with the decision made at the time. So there is no reason to defend it."
"The data is the data. The data is very clear now. You can blame it on hindsight, you can blame it on "we didn't know as much as we know now at the time," you can go through all sorts of things, but you can tell the truth and then the public will start trusting the CDC again," said Crenshaw.
"It's ok to say it didn't make any sense to shut down schools. The data shows that now. It didn't make any sense to do major lockdowns. The data shows that now. It doesn't make sense to mask kids. The data shows that now. It's ok to say it."
Crenshaw went on to say it was scary to think about a disease in the future that could kill half the population or that targets children where masking would be necessary and that the public is "not going to trust you because you refused to say you were even wrong."
Crenshaw questioned the redundancy of the CDC by citing numerous other agencies who seem to "do the same thing" the CDC does.
Cohen said the CDC's work is mainly about "detection" of illnesses and using "expertise" and "best practices" to communicate threats.
"I appreciate your effort to create an operational CDC but it's not there right now," Crenshaw replied before shifting to the biolab.
Crenshaw described the lab as having over 1,000 humanized "transgenic mice" infected with a wide range of serious diseases such as COVID, tuberculosis, SARS, Hepatitis, HIV, and even ebola.
Crenshaw then asked Cohen why it took so long for the CDC to respond and investigate.
"The American public believes in their minds this is exactly what the CDC is for," said Crenshaw before asking Cohen for a timeline of the CDC's response.
Cohen said there were a "number of inaccuracies" in the report that was put together on the lab situation.
She then said state and local authorities were in charge and the CDC's role was to do an investigation when "we were invited and asked to do that."
"We did respond. We sent a team. They were there for two and a half days and they did an extensive review," said Cohen. "What we found was no evidence of select agents."
"And, really, what was compelling as I reviewed that information, it wasn't that they didn't have any equipment that would have allowed folks to work with select agents," Cohen said. "So, not only did we see the freezers and the paper..."
Crenshaw interrupted, asking how long it took from the time the CDC received the request to the CDC showing up because he said he believed it took "a Congress person from California to get the CDC there."
"My understanding is when we were asked, we deployed," replied Cohen.
Crenshaw questioned Cohen on "select agents" stating it was his understanding that if a vial wasn't labeled then it was not tested.
Cohen responded that the CDC's "authority is limited" and reiterated her previous statement about the two-day investigation.
Not letting the topic go, Crenshaw told Cohen she needed to explain what law limited the CDC's testing authority.
"So, if something says Gatorade on it, you're... like, I mean, it could be ebola, could be Gatorade... [it] says Gatorade, don't test it.. the law says don't test it," Crenshaw said. "I am having a hard time believing the law says that."
Crenshaw ran out of time before Cohen could respond.
Here’s part of the exchange between Crenshaw and Cohen:
Florida Republican Rep. Neal Dunn picked up with Crenshaw left off by referring to the the House Select Committee on China's report on the biolab which Cohen had criticized earlier in the hearing.
The House Select Committee's report on the alleged lab located in Reedly, California, was issued on Nov. 15 and announced again on Nov. 16 during a press conference.
The link to the report on the Select Committee's website is not correct but the Reedly Biolab report can be accessed HERE.
The Select Committee summarized the key findings as follows:
The illegal biolab was run by a PRC citizen who is a wanted fugitive from Canada with a $330 million Canadian dollar judgment against him for stealing American intellectual property.
This PRC citizen was a top official at a PRC-state-controlled company and had links to military-civil fusion entities.
The illegal biolab received millions of dollars in unexplained payments from PRC banks while running the illegal biolab.
The illegal biolab contained thousands of samples of labeled, unlabeled, and encoded potential pathogens, including HIV, malaria, tuberculosis, and Covid.
The illegal biolab also contained a freezer labeled “Ebola,” which contained unlabeled, sealed silver bags consistent with how the lab stored high risk biological materials. Ebola is a Select Agent with a lethality rate between 25-90%.
The biolab contained nearly a thousand transgenic mice, genetically engineered to mimic the human immune system. Lab workers said that the mice were designed “to catch and carry the COVID-19 virus.”
After local officials who discovered the lab sought help from the CDC and others, the CDC refused to test any of the samples.
Citing the report, Dunn said the CDC didn't even bother to translate some of the vials that had Chinese writing on them.
He also said that when local officials asked the CDC how to dispose of ebola samples, Dunn referred to an email that he entered into the record sent by a "CDC branch chief."
Dunn said that the CDC official responded to the local authorities by saying, "They didn't see an urgent need to test these samples at the moment," and the materials the CDC examined were "not a serious threat to public health."
"The conclusion the CDC made that a refrigerator labeled Ebola was not likely to contain Ebola, and you look at the totality of this situation, it reads like a nightmare... a horror story," said Dunn. "In what world is this ok?"
Dunn later asked, "How do you expect the American public to take our health institutions seriously when this is their reaction?"
The Florida Congressman then asked Cohen if the CDC was the frontline on infectious diseases in the U.S.
Cohen responded by repeating her earlier testimony about the "inaccuracies" in the Select Committee's report and that the CDC showed up to investigate "when asked."
The full hearing video can be viewed below: