CDC director resigns after reports she bought and sold tobacco company stocks

Jayne O'Donnell | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption CDC director resigns after reports she bought tobacco stocks The head of the CDC has resigned after reports from politico came out saying she traded tobacco stocks one month after taking office.

President Trump's director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) resigned Wednesday after a report that she was trading in tobacco company investments.

Brenda Fitzgerald, a physician, "owns certain complex financial interests" that complicated her work as CDC director, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) spokesman Matt Lloyd said in a statement. She could not divest in a timely manner, he said.

Those interests especially conflicted with Fitzgerald's work leading efforts to convince people to stop smoking. Politico reported Tuesday that Fitzgerald bought shares in a tobacco company one month after she became the top public health official tasked with the job of reducing the top cause of preventable disease.

HHS Secretary Alex Azar accepted her resignation after she advised him of "both the status of the financial interests and the scope of her recusal," Lloyd said.

Azar replaced former representative Tom Price, another Georgia Republican, as HHS secretary after a Politico report on Price's extensive use of pricey government jets for official travel. That followed widespread news reports of Price's own extensive stock trading and investments in health-related companies.

As Georgia's health secretary, Politico reported, Fitzgerald owned shares in five tobacco companies — Reynolds American, British American Tobacco, Imperial Brands, Philip Morris International and Altria Group Inc.

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Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., called the news, “Yet another example of this administration’s dysfunction and questionable ethics."

Murray had earlier raised concerns that she had to recuse herself from so much of CDC's work that it "prevented her from fully engaging on public health issues including cancer, the opioid epidemic, and other epidemics that involved information technology."

Fitzgerald's resignation comes as CDC's work has been especially high profile over the past year with the public health concerns over back-to-back hurricanes and the particularly bad flu season this year, says John Auerbach, CEO of the non-profit Trust for America's Health.

"Any distraction from the core important work of the CDC, particularly as we enter the budget season can potentially impair the agency’s ability to do what it does so well," says Auerbach, a former CDC director of policy and health commissioner of Massachusetts.