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Mandy Cohen — the doctor rumored to be President Joe Biden’s successor to the scandal-plagued Rochelle Walensky atop the Centers for Disease Control — loves Anthony Fauci, multiple sources familiar with her record tell The Spectator.
Biden’s likely pick to helm the CDC has what many view as a troubling record of politicizing science and unnecessarily supporting draconian lockdown measures, even in the face of scientific reality.
Most are seizing on a photo of Cohen wearing a mask emblazoned with a giant picture of Anthony Fauci and a video of her at a briefing (while North Carolina was under a strict mask mandate) in which she looks to see if the cameras are on, pretends to put on her mask, then pretends to take it off.
However, her record beyond viral pictures and videos paints a picture of someone who leveraged her previous position in government to prosecute political vendettas.
Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks, who spent decades as a doctor and three years as the director of Iowa’s Department of Public Health, told The Spectator that Cohen’s on-paper qualifications cover up a troubling record of partisanship and “egregious Covid-19 policies.”
“As North Carolina’s former health secretary from 2017-2021, Dr. Mandy Cohen appears, on the surface, to be immensely qualified,” Miller-Meeks said. “However, given the loss of trust in the CDC, a political activist physician is not what this ‘doctor ordered.’
“Dr. Cohen vociferously supported lockdowns and prohibiting social gatherings, supported mask mandates — even while violating her own imposed restrictions — and supported mask mandates for school children, regardless of vaccination status.”
Representative Mike Collins, who sits on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, went even further. “Americans don’t trust the CDC, and the appointment of another lockdown extremist will only make that worse,” he said. “The pandemic exposed the tyrants among us, and Dr. Cohen, like Joe Biden, is one of them.”
Towards the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, Cohen presided over a delayed and bungled response to testing some of North Carolina’s most vulnerable: senior citizens in nursing homes, which at the time academics lambasted as “unconscionable.”
While the Covid-19 era was marked by scientific uncertainty, Cohen’s actions at times stand out as cruel and vindictive.
In September 2021, for example, Cohen lashed out at a North Carolina school district that ended quarantines and contact tracing for students exposed to Covid. In a letter to the school board, Cohen threatened legal action, and wrote that these policies posed “an imminent threat of serious adverse health consequences for students, teachers, staff and the public more broadly.”
Cohen’s threats of legal action against schools represented a major about-face for her from July 2020, where she was incredibly optimistic about school reopenings. “Schools have not played a significant role in the spreading of Covid-19,” Cohen said at the time. “Children, particularly younger children, are less likely than adults to be infected with Covid-19. And for children who do become infected with Covid-19, they seem to be less likely to transmit it to others.”
For those who had been concerned that outgoing CDC director Walensky’s close coordination with teachers’ unions would be a thing of the past under her successor, Cohen’s record proves troubling. One North Carolina parent told me that Cohen jettisoned science to do the bidding of teachers’ unions, not of parents and students. “It was clear that schools could reopen safely, but the NC Association of Educators, the closest thing North Carolina has to a teachers’ union, and liberals were deeply opposed to the idea. I don’t think Cooper could have won re-election [in 2020] without support from the left-wing.”
Beyond Cohen’s failures on school reopenings, her critics highlight her willingness to shut down religious services and fun. Cohen recently discussed her decision to shut down football in North Carolina. Her state also lost its All-Star NASCAR race to neighboring Tennessee over its Covid-19 restrictions. The state’s restrictions were so severe that studies from WalletHub would regularly rank it as one of the worst in America; in August 2020, for example, North Carolina was the forty-ninth best state on Covid-19 restrictions.
Cohen’s critics, like the North Carolina-based John Locke Foundation, point to comments like this — and her failures to respond to open records requests — as further evidence of bad judgment and a lack of transparency. Amy O. Cooke, the Locke Foundation’s CEO, said that Cohen “didn’t answer any open records requests regarding from whom she was seeking and getting data and advice regarding Covid-19 mandates.”
Ironically, the Locke Foundation’s analysis showed that Cohen’s Department of Health and Human Services was three and a half months behind the rest of the country in reporting death data to the very same CDC that she is now likely to helm. “Those data are much too late to alert Governor Roy Cooper and his administration that his lockdowns and severe personal and business restrictions are creating more harm than good,” the Foundation’s Jon Sanders wrote in 2021.
Cohen’s former department is actually still being sued by a North Carolina racetrack owner over how she allegedly singled out a racetrack for closure during the pandemic because its owner criticized the administration of North Carolina’s Democratic governor.
The decision to shut down ACE Speedway without merit looks even worse for Cohen when considering her failure to provide adequate testing for North Carolina’s vulnerable seniors. “While Cohen was focusing on shutting down outdoor events like ACE Speedway, her department lagged behind the rest of the country in implementing mandatory testing programs at nursing homes,” a North Carolina observer told me.
Beyond Cohen’s vindictive nature as the head of North Carolina’s Covid-19 task force, her opponents have unearthed what they view as troubling evidence of her history as a partisan Democratic activist.
The most prominent instance was unearthed by a group called Activist Facts, a watchdog organization that focuses heavily on nonprofits — like one that Cohen helped found. Doctors for America, which Cohen co-founded as Doctors for Obama, could pose significant problems for her during the confirmation process.
Following Obama’s election in 2008, Doctors for Obama rebranded as Doctors for America and worked to help pass Obama’s signature legislation, the Affordable Care Act. Since then, it has taken on a litany of left-wing causes, including a demand that prisons release inmates during Covid-19 and a push to drastically “[scale] back the role of law enforcement,” which Activist Facts calls a push to defund the police.
“Americans should view Dr. Mandy Cohen’s impending selection to lead the CDC with a skeptical eye,” an Activist Facts spokesperson told The Spectator. “The organization — first founded as Doctors for Obama — has frequently advocated for policies that are well beyond the practice of medicine. Engaging in the gun control debate, siding with the anti-police movement and framing climate change as a major public health threat are prime examples.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Cohen’s likely nomination isn’t going over well with North Carolina Republicans.
Representative Greg Murphy, the only practicing surgeon currently in Congress, was the first to call for Walensky’s resignation, which she gave exactly two years to the day after his initial demand. He told me that Cohen has her work cut out for her.
“Public trust in medicine has eroded over the years because of the federal government’s heavy hand in dictating what is best for a family, small business, or educational institution,” he said. “It’s for that reason I called on Director Walensky to resign in the first place. I would hope the new director would help restore confidence in the agency by relying on objective science rather than political science.”
Dale Folwell, the North Carolina treasurer currently running for governor, said that this news warrants divine intervention. “Pray for our country,” he said. “As a member of the NC Council of State, my observation is that the actions of Dr. Mandy Cohen during Covid resulted in more disease, death, poverty and illiteracy.”
Cohen does not actually require Senate confirmation until 2025, and her record suggests that could be an uphill climb even if President Biden wins a second term next November.
