Whoever is picked from President Donald Trump‘s short list to be the next director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would be tasked with revitalizing the struggling agency and revamping the administration’s public health agenda.
Although the White House has not confirmed the names, multiple media outlets have reported Mississippi State Health Officer Dr. Daniel Edney, former Kentucky Gov. Dr. Ernie Fletcher, and Johns Hopkins University cardiologist Dr. Joseph Marine are under consideration for the top public health post.
The CDC has had a tumultuous year since Trump took office, cycling through three directors and undergoing significant turnover in career staff.
Trump’s first Senate-confirmed CDC Director, Dr. Susan Monarez, was fired in late August following a conflict with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over his desire to curtail the number of vaccines recommended to children.
Following Monarez’s departure, then-Deputy HHS Secretary Jim O’Neill was given the job of acting CDC director until a replacement could be nominated.
But as part of a broader leadership change last month, O’Neill was removed from HHS entirely and replaced at the CDC by the current National Institutes of Health Director, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who is overseeing both agencies.
Insiders reported at the time of the shake-up that the shuffle was in part to distance HHS from various controversies surrounding vaccine recommendations, which have been consistently unpopular with voters, even Republicans.
The White House is also under a time crunch to choose the right candidate, as the CDC is only statutorily allowed to have an acting director for 210 days. That deadline, which was set when Monarez was fired, passed on March 25.
Each of the physicians on the short list for CDC director has medical experience that aligns with the more widely popular elements of the Make America Healthy Again agenda, such as combating chronic disease, but they also each have weak spots that could threaten their path toward Senate confirmation.
Here is what to know about each candidate.
Mississippi state health officer Daniel Edney
Edney is the most traditional pick for CDC director. He has served as the chief public health official for the Magnolia State since August 2022.
Mississippi notoriously suffers from some of the worst health outcomes in the United States, but it has improved on most metrics since Edney took office, moving from dead last in overall health to No. 48 last year.
Edney has also been a champion for vaccines in Mississippi, which, until 2023, was one of the only states in the country to not allow religious exemptions for school-required childhood vaccines, until the state’s laws were struck down by the courts. He lamented last year that the rule change had caused Mississippi to slip in its vaccination rates, though it remains among the most vaccinated states in the country.
Edney’s support for Mississippi’s vaccine mandates is not likely to earn him friends among more ardent supporters of the MAHA movement.
Anti-vaccine activist and attorney Aaron Siri slammed Edney on X, calling him “a vaccine zealot” on Tuesday and highlighting Mississippi’s historically poor track record on public health.
“Edney has no business dispensing bandaids, let alone running the CDC,” Siri said.
Aside from his public health policy, Edney’s candidacy could be jeopardized by both his prior involvement with the controversial group, the Sons of Confederate Veterans and his public repentance using language that could be described as “woke.”
The Sons of Confederate Veterans is often categorized as a neo-Confederate group that promotes the so-called “Lost Cause ideology,” which minimizes the role of slavery in the Civil War. Local news outlet the Mississippi Free Press reported in 2022 that Edney was involved with the controversial group until at least 2013.
Edney said in a long-form interview with the outlet that his perspective on race changed after working as a part of disaster medicine teams in Indonesia, Haiti, Lebanon, Nepal, Iraq, and several Central American countries.
During the 2022 interview, Edney described himself as “a recovering physician—recovering from implicit bias, in the midst of structural racism.”
Former Kentucky Gov. Ernie Fletcher
Fletcher has significant experience in health insurance policy and public health approaches to reducing chronic disease, but he does not have the infectious disease experience that Kennedy has said is necessary for the CDC.
Fletcher earned his medical degree at the University of Kentucky before running for Congress in 1998.
While representing the Bluegrass State in the House, Fletcher worked on various tort reform policies for health maintenance organizations. His legislation ultimately failed, but he was recognized by Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and encouraged to run for governor, which he won and took office in 2003.
Fletcher advanced a “Get Kentucky Healthy” agenda during his gubernatorial term, incentivizing improved diet and exercise for the state’s population in a tone similar to Kennedy’s MAHA movement. The plan included school lunch reform and increasing physical activity for school children.
Fletcher and his Republican colleagues used this proto-MAHA approach to reform Kentucky’s Medicaid program for low-income Americans by offering more benefits to enrollees, such as vision and dental, who engaged in cost-saving disease management programs. The reforms ultimately did not last, being swept away by the next Democratic administration and the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010.
After leaving politics in 2007, the former governor created the Fletcher Group, a 501c(3) nonprofit group that develops evidence-based policy for addiction recovery and homelessness mitigation.
The Fletcher Group list of partners includes HHS’s Health Resources and Services Administration, the agency that Kennedy announced in February would lead the $100 million investment in addiction recovery and homeless prevention programs.
Johns Hopkins Cardiologist Joseph Marine
Unlike the other two front-runners for CDC director, Marine has no governing experience under his belt, instead serving in a leadership role in Johns Hopkins’s cardiology division.
But Marine does fit in with other Trump administration health officials in that he remains largely critical of how the public health establishment handled the COVID-19 pandemic.
Much of Marine’s personal X account features posts criticizing former White House COVID-19 adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci and highlighting the recent six-year anniversary of the “15 days to slow the spread” initiative that kick-started nationwide lockdowns in early 2020.
In late 2024, Marine also published an opinion piece in the Free Press praising Bhattacharya, who himself rose to prominence by criticizing lockdown policies during the pandemic.
In the piece, Marine outlined a 10-point plan for NIH reform that has largely been implemented or adopted into the broader GOP’s goals for the agency, including decreasing financial conflicts of interest, depoliticizing research, and shifting away from animal testing.
He also criticized how heavily Fauci, then head of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was involved in crafting and promoting public health policy during the pandemic, instead of focusing on research.
“When a [NIH institute] director publicly supports a particular health policy—as happened during Covid—scientists who depend on the director for funding and other support are unlikely to speak up in opposition to the position, no matter their qualms,” Marine wrote. “This dual role by institute directors inhibits open scientific debate, promotes groupthink, and creates an illusion of consensus.”
