Dr. Jennifer Shuford, the deputy director and chief medical officer of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), has resigned and will leave the Trump administration next month, the agency confirmed on Tuesday. Her last day is November 12, nine days after the November 3 midterm elections and about six months after President Donald Trump brought her in as part of a new leadership team meant to restore confidence in the agency. In the statement the CDC released, Shuford said she is leaving to spend more time with her family.
"I am leaving to spend more time with my family," Shuford said in the statement. "I am so thankful to President Trump and Secretary Kennedy for giving me the opportunity to help lead CDC. It has been an amazing experience, and I will be forever grateful for it." The first reports of her departure, based on people familiar with the matter, appeared on Monday night, and Shuford confirmed it late that night. CDC Director Erica Schwartz announced the news to agency staff in an email on Tuesday morning, and the CDC then confirmed it publicly.
Schwartz praised her in a statement of her own. "I am deeply grateful for Dr. Shuford's outstanding leadership and commitment to CDC and public health, especially as she has navigated an exceptionally demanding, high-profile, and constantly evolving environment over the past several months," the director said. Dr. Satish Pillai, a career agency official who leads the CDC's Ebola response, will serve as acting deputy director and chief medical officer while the agency searches for a permanent successor.
The job is the agency's senior clinical post: Shuford provides clinical, scientific and public health leadership across the CDC's domestic and global work and advises the director on clinical and scientific priorities. Her short tenure included overseeing the CDC's response to an Ebola outbreak overseas, on top of running battles at home over measles outbreaks and the push to rewrite the childhood vaccine schedule.
Shuford, an infectious disease physician, was named on April 17 as one of four senior leaders Trump appointed to steady the CDC: Schwartz was nominated as director, Sean Slovenski became a deputy director and chief operating officer, Food and Drug Administration official Sara Brenner also joined the team, and Shuford took the deputy director and chief medical officer role, a job that does not require Senate confirmation. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. greeted the team as the people who would restore trust, accountability and scientific integrity at the agency.
Before Washington, Shuford spent nearly a decade in Texas public health. She joined the Texas Department of State Health Services in 2017, served as the state's chief state epidemiologist through the Covid pandemic, and became commissioner in 2022, running the department for almost four years — including the response to the West Texas measles outbreak last year, which grew to more than 750 cases and killed two school-age children. She started at the CDC in June.
Why she is leaving depends on who is describing it. On the record, Shuford gives one reason: family. The fuller explanation rests on unnamed sources, and it should be read that way. According to people familiar with the matter, one person attributed the departure to a family health issue, while others said she had clashed with the administration over its drive to overhaul the federal vaccine guidance, and that the disagreement factored into her decision. Shuford has not said that herself, and she did not respond to at least one request for further comment on Tuesday. When the first reports landed on Monday night, neither the CDC nor the White House responded to requests for comment; the confirmation and the statements came the following day.
The policy at the center of the reported clash is the administration's campaign to remake the childhood vaccine schedule. Trump's case is that American children are given more shots than children in other developed countries, and that smaller amounts, spaced further apart, are the safer course. Executive orders in May and on August 10 realigned the core recommendations with peer nations, set 11 diseases as the routine childhood list, and recommended that the combined measles, mumps and rubella shot be split into three separate single-disease shots given at separate visits — single-disease versions not currently licensed in the United States. Last month Trump said the push will go further: "We're going to recommend that they do five doses, and that they be given in six-month intervals so that a small amount of the vaccine gets pumped into the body." He has said he believes the changes will produce a massive reduction in autism.
Where that plan stands is the courts. An earlier attempt in January to cut six diseases from the schedule was halted by a federal judge in March, and the August recommendations remain tied up in litigation, so the schedule American doctors actually use has not yet changed. Mainstream medical organizations and vaccine scientists say there is no evidence that splitting or spacing the shots makes them safer, that large studies have repeatedly found no link between vaccines and autism, and that drugmakers warn splitting the combined measles shot would mean more injections and more missed vaccinations. Supporters answer that parents, not federal committees, should control how many shots a small child receives at once.
The reaction split along familiar lines. Yolanda Jacobs, president of the union local representing many CDC workers, called the departure a sign of continuing dysfunction: "When the agency's own leadership can't build a lasting, cohesive team, imagine the damaging effects this has on the employees they're charged with leading." Administration officials have said nothing beyond the CDC's statements of thanks.
Her departure adds to an unusually unsettled stretch at the top of the agency. Six different people have served as CDC director or acting director since the start of 2025. The last confirmed director before Schwartz, Susan Monarez, was fired in August 2025 just 29 days into the job after clashing over vaccine directives, and the agency went about a year without a Senate-confirmed leader until Schwartz won confirmation this past August. Shuford is the first member of the April team — the group assembled to end exactly this kind of churn — to leave.
For ordinary families, this is not just a Washington personnel story. The CDC's vaccine guidance is the schedule pediatricians follow and parents argue over in the examination room, and the chief medical officer is the agency's senior clinician, whose office helps decide what that guidance says. Her seat will be filled on an acting basis in the middle of flu season, while the courts decide whether the childhood schedule she reportedly argued over is rewritten.
What happens next is only partly known. Pillai takes over on an acting basis on November 12, and the CDC says it will start the search for a permanent successor in the near future; no timeline has been given, and where Shuford goes next has not been announced. Nine days after Americans vote, the CDC loses the chief medical officer it hired six months ago to help restore confidence in the agency.
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