Center Director Tom Inglesby Co-Authors Guest Essay in The New York Times About US CDC Reform

May 8, 2023 – In a New York Times commentary published on May 7, Dr. Tom Inglesby, Director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Dr. J. Stephen Morrison, Senior Vice President and Director, Global Health Policy Center, Center for Strategic & International Studies, outline a series of solutions to the challenges facing CDC and discuss the importance of implementing these recommendations.

Drs. Inglesby and Morrison highlight the need to:

• Redesign incentives for the workforce, including ways to attract and retain them.
• Transform its communications capacities, including hiring more staff with the skills and bandwidth to successfully communicate with diverse segments of the US population.
• Give more authority to collect basic, anonymized outbreak data from state and local entities and budgetary flexibility to move funds to where they are needed in a crisis.

Finally, they call on government leaders to take urgent action.

“This historic opportunity for change cannot be squandered,” they urge, concluding, “Leaders in the Biden administration and Congress…have an opportunity to build bipartisan consensus around pragmatic reforms that will restore the CDC to high performance and high trust, and ensure the safety of Americans into the future.”

Read How to Overhaul the C.D.C.

Media Contact
Cagla Giray, cgiray1@jhu.edu