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A new org chart for the CDC

A new org chart for the CDC

With David Lim and Carmen Paun

CH-CH-CHANGES — More big leadership changes are underway at the CDC, Krista and Ben Leonard report, as Director Rochelle Walensky continues to overhaul the public health agency, a process she started last spring.

Running the show: Leandris Liburd will be acting director of the new Office of Health Equity, and Jennifer Layden will be the acting director for the new Office of Public Health Data, Surveillance and Technology, Krista and Ben learned.

Liburd has served as the director of the CDC’s Office of Minority Health and Health Equity since 2011. Layden is the CDC’s associate deputy director of Public Health Science and Surveillance, a role she took over in April. She’s helped oversee the agency’s Data Modernization Initiative.

Their appointments come amid other recent, high-level leadership changes: Earlier this month, Maine CDC director Nirav Shah was named as the agency’s new principal deputy director, and Debra Houry, who will stay on as acting principal deputy director until Shah starts, was named as the CDC’s chief medical officer and deputy director for science and programs.

The big picture: Walenksy sent an email, obtained by POLITICO, to staff on Tuesday that featured a revamped organizational chart in which several offices, including the new data and equity offices, will report directly to the Office of the Director.

It also included the creation of a new Global Health Center and a big new position — the director for external affairs within the CDC chief of staff’s office to “strengthen our relationships across government, academia, non-profits, and the business community, helping outside organizations navigate and partner with CDC,” Walensky wrote.

The plan is to have the new structure in place by the end of February, said a person familiar with the matter.

The bigger picture: It’s no mistake that data, equity and external partnerships are getting some special attention in this restructuring. They’re all areas Walensky has said she wants to strengthen as part of her “Moving Forward” initiative.

Walensky announced the agency’s restructuring in August 2022, following two reviews conducted by Health Resources and Services Administration official Jim Macrae into the CDC’s pandemic response and another by CDC Chief of Staff Sherri Berger into agency operations.

The reviews concluded that the agency’s traditional structure and work culture weren’t fast or transparent enough to meet the demands of a public health crisis as sweeping as Covid-19.

WELCOME TO WEDNESDAY PULSE — Your early fact for the week is that several mushrooms — including the common oyster mushroom found in your local vegetable aisle — are carnivorous, eating worms that wander across their fleshy lobes. Now you know. Send your news and tips to [email protected] and [email protected].

TODAY ON OUR PULSE CHECK PODCAST, Lauren Gardner talks with Alice Miranda Ollstein about anti-abortion groups that are pushing back against Republican lawmakers in some conservative states because they fear GOP-controlled legislatures will water down their near-total abortion bans and stir up politically contentious debates over already-vetted laws.

MCCARTHY NAMES COVID PANEL — House Speaker Kevin McCarthy named on Tuesday the members of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic formed earlier this month.

The members, whose names were revealed on McCarthy’s Twitter account, are Chair Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) and Reps. Nicole Malliotakis (R-N.Y.), Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-Iowa), Debbie Lesko (R. Ariz.), Michael Cloud (R-Texas), John Joyce (R-Pa.), Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), Ronny Jackson (R-Texas) and Rich McCormick (R-Ga.).

The panel, established in the House rules package adopted in January, will operate under the newly renamed Committee on Oversight and Accountability.

ALL EYES ON THE GOLDEN STATE — California’s first-in-the-nation mandate for student health centers to carry abortion pills is just one of more than a dozen new California policies that aim to make the state the nation’s leading haven for abortion rights, POLITICO’s Alice Miranda Ollstein reports.

After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last June, GOP-controlled states raced to outlaw abortion, while California Gov. Gavin Newsom and the state’s Democratic legislature sped in the opposite direction.

They enacted new legal protections and tech privacy measures for patients and providers, allocated hundreds of millions of dollars to help low-income people afford the procedure and created programs to grow the medical workforce needed to handle the out-of-state influx.

The new laws were crafted to serve two purposes: Shore up protections for people seeking and providing abortions and expand access to the procedure.

But the state’s aggressive stance has also made it a target of the anti-abortion movement, including on university campuses.

At the University of California, Santa Barbara, campus, for instance, that meant closing all entrances to its health complex except one tucked away near the building’s loading dock to make it harder for anti-abortion protesters to storm the building.

HOW (UN)HEALTHY IS MY DISTRICT? Now you can find out, in a new dashboard released today by researchers at NYU Grossman School of Medicine and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

The dashboard offers a glimpse into 36 health metrics for all 435 congressional districts across the country, as well as the District of Columbia.

Some takeaways from the researchers’ data analysis:

— Residents in congressional districts in the 11 states that haven’t expanded Medicaid coverage under the Affordable Care Act are twice as likely to be uninsured compared with those in states with expanded Medicaid coverage.

— Hispanic residents have the highest rates of uninsurance in most congressional districts.

— Deaths from cardiovascular disease are lower in suburban districts, at 194 deaths per 100,000, compared with urban and rural districts, at 215 and 225 deaths per 100,000, respectively.

— In more than three-quarters of the districts in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina and South Carolina, Black newborns are roughly twice as likely to be underweight at birth than white babies.

CMS TOUTS MEDICARE INSULIN OUT-OF-POCKET CAP — President Joe Biden is touting a new analysis published by his health department on Tuesday that found 1.5 million Medicare Part D beneficiaries would have saved $734 million if the Inflation Reduction Act’s insulin provision limiting monthly cost sharing to $35 had been in effect in 2020, David reports.

The provision kicked into effect on Jan. 1; however, Part D plans have until March 31 to implement the cap. The law requires beneficiaries to be reimbursed for excess cost sharing within 30 days.

“There are some people who are already seeing it when they go to the pharmacy now,” CMS Administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure told POLITICO. “And then there are others that will be reimbursed by their plan.”

In July, the monthly cap on insulin cost sharing will take effect for Medicare Part B, an IRA provision that will benefit those who require insulin administered through nondisposable insulin pumps. The HHS analysis found that the provision would have saved about $27 million for approximately 31,000 Part B beneficiaries if it had been in effect in 2020.

TELEHEALTH: MAYBE NOT A MIRACLE CURE — Despite widespread belief that telehealth would make it easier for people to access treatment for opioid use disorder, a new study has found no evidence to back up that view, Ben writes.

The study’s findings, published Tuesday in JAMA Network Open, undermine a key argument for permanently continuing virtual prescribing of the drugs used to treat the disorder, a practice permitted under a pandemic emergency waiver.

While virtual care usage significantly spiked during the pandemic, researchers found no difference in treatment initiation or clinical outcomes among patients in the low- and high-use telemedicine groups. However, that finding might be explained by a dearth of broadband internet service in lower-income and rural areas.

GATES FOUNDATION BOSS SLAMS LACK OF PANDEMIC PREP MONEY — Mark Suzman, the CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, said on Tuesday he was amazed at the lack of money from governments for future pandemic preparedness given the huge economic losses the world experienced because of the current pandemic, Carmen writes.

A World Bank–hosted Pandemic Fund, which is expected to issue its first call for proposals next week, has received only about $1.6billion in commitments so far — a fraction of the $10 billion it seeks yearly.

“What you get is a lot of grand statements and commitments,” Suzman said in a briefing to reporters Monday. “The profound lesson is: it’s very difficult when governments and other partners and private sector are focusing on short-term issues from inflation to energy [and] just not rising to the challenge.”

For its part, the Gates Foundation announced last week a 15 percent increase in its 2023 budget, set to reach $8.3 billion, to be spent mainly on global health, women empowerment, agriculture and education. The foundation aims to reach a $9 billion budget by 2026.

AmerisourceBergen has said it will change its name and brand to Cencora to better reflect “its global strategy and its bold vision and purpose-driven approach to creating healthier futures,” according to a company statement.

The New York Times reports that an increasing number of hospitals and medical practices are charging for doctors’ written responses to patients.

The Associated Press reports on new gene therapy that shows promise in treating several brain disorders.

Stat reports on how the increasing prevalence of chatbots raises new questions in mental health care.

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