Flouting CDC, Youngkin health chief wants to help Virginia move on from covid

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Flouting CDC, Youngkin health chief wants to help Virginia move on from covid

By Jenna Portnoy
Yesterday at 7:00 a.m. EST | Updated yesterday at 3:41 p.m. EST

Colin Greene knew that some public health directors — foot soldiers in the fight against coronavirus — would balk at Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s order making masks optional in schools. ... The rule Youngkin (R) implemented the day he took office flipped the playbook they’d followed for two years overnight, and undermined Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance as infection rates skyrocketed and patients overwhelmed hospitals. ... “A lot of people are really invested in the old way of doing things, the pre-omicron way of doing things,” Greene, the state’s acting health commissioner, said in an interview Thursday. “Many are also culturally invested in essentially every word that comes out of the CDC. … There’s a lot more to health than just preventing disease.”

[More than half of Virginia school districts are defying Youngkin’s mask-optional order]

Greene, 63, inherits an agency on the front lines of responding to a pandemic that had killed 16,127 Virginians as of Friday. He is well-liked in northwestern Virginia, where he was health director in a region spanning four counties and the city of Winchester, for more than four years before Youngkin tapped him for the statewide role.

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Formally deputy health commissioner, Greene is serving as an acting replacement for M. Norman Oliver, an appointee of former governor Ralph Northam and the former chair of the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. Oliver’s research focused on health inequities, especially the impact on racial and ethnic minorities. ... Oliver said he wanted to continue to serve in the role of commissioner in the Youngkin administration and gave the transition team an overview of the agency, including coronavirus response efforts, but was never interviewed. Although he believes universal masking should continue in schools, he said Greene understands public health and praised the leadership team that has remained within the agency. ... “I disagree with [Greene’s] stance on masks, that’s a mistake,” Oliver said in an interview Saturday. "It will lead to more outbreaks in the schools and will impact staffing. We want to keep the schools open. We’re all in agreement on that.”

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Greene received a bachelor’s degree from Johns Hopkins University, a medical degree from Temple University and a master’s in public health from the University of Washington School of Public Health in Seattle. He will oversee an agency with about 3,800 full-time employees and a budget of more than $800 million. ... Greene has held a variety of posts as a military physician, including at the U.S. Army Warrior Transition Command in Alexandria and in Joint Trauma Analysis and Prevention of Injury in Combat at Fort Detrick, Md. He said he learned how vaccines are manufactured during a stint as interim commander at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Silver Spring.

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Gregory S. Schneider contributed to this report.

By Jenna Portnoy
Jenna Portnoy is the local healthcare reporter for The Washington Post. She previously covered members of Congress from the Greater Washington region and worked in the Richmond bureau. Before coming to the Post, she worked for the Newark Star-Ledger in her home state, as well as the Allentown Morning Call and Philadelphia City Paper. Twitter https://twitter.com/jennaportnoy