A 2023 law championed by Republicans requires the CDC have a director confirmed by the Senate. For months, though, it's had only acting directors--and the White House won't say when that will change. As the agency rotates through a cast of leaders, it's unclear when--or if--the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will get a permanent director under Donald Trump's second term as president. Following Jim O'Neill's departure as acting CDC director last week, National Institutes of Health director Jay Bhattacharya will now lead both agencies temporarily. It's the latest in a series of shakeups at Trump's CDC, which has lost about a quarter of its staff to mass layoffs carried out by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. last year.

Former CDC Director Robert Redfield sits down for an exclusive interview with Fox News' Dr. Marc Siegel to discuss his belief that COVID-19 'evolved' from a Wuhan lab. EXCLUSIVE: Robert Redfield, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, explained the reasoning behind his opinion that a lab leak was the most likely explanation for the COVID-19 pandemic's origins, in a wide-ranging interview with Fox News. The former CDC director discussed the ongoing debate over the COVID-19 pandemic's origins during a lengthy interview this past weekend with Dr. Marc Siegel, a professor of medicine at the NYU Langone Medical Center and a Fox News contributor. While Dr. Anthony Fauci and other leading members of the science community have long argued that human contact with an infected animal started the pandemic, calls to investigate the lab leak theory have intensified in recent days. Redfield argued COVID-19's efficient human-to-human spread contradicted the behavior of other deadly coronaviruses with similar profiles, such as SARS and MERS, which first reached humans through animal contact but spread at a much slower pace.