Mandy Cohen, the face of North Carolina’s COVID response, to leave health department

Dr. Mandy Cohen, secretary of the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services and a fixture of the state’s coronavirus pandemic response, is stepping down from her job, according to a source in the legislature.

ABC11, The News & Observer’s news partner, first reported that Cohen will resign.

Cohen has served as the state health department’s secretary since 2017 and is part of Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s Cabinet. She has been by his side for countless news briefings since the pandemic first reached the Old North State in March of 2020 and has been known in part for repeating the guidelines at the pandemic’s peak to “Wear, Wait, Wash,” known as the “three Ws” of safety precautions.

In 2020, she was also named The News & Observer’s Tar Heel of the Year for her work on the state’s coronavirus response.

Cohen received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine in March 2021 alongside the Rev. William Barber, and has consistently pushed for everyone to get vaccinated, and now, booster shots, too.

Multiple times a week during the height of the pandemic in 2020, and frequently in 2021, Cohen and Cooper have spoken to reporters and to the cameras in COVID-19 response press briefings held at the Emergency Operations Center, livestreamed into people’s homes and workplaces.

Cohen regularly wears a necklace that is the Hebrew letter “chai,” which means “life.”

Cohen told The N&O in a 2020 interview that it was a gift from her mother when she got into medical school. It has both cultural and personal family significance to her, she said, and she wears it every day.

Cooper’s pandemic team

Another key member of Cooper’s COVID-19 response team, Mike Sprayberry, retired this summer as executive director of of the state’s emergency management division. He worked with Cohen before and during the pandemic.

“I knew she was a force to be reckoned with back during Hurricane Florence,” Sprayberry said in an interview in 2020.

“I’m proud of her to be the lead in this response. I think she knows what she’s doing. I think she’s very intentional about her approach. She can make a course correction about moving forward,” Sprayberry said then.

Another Cooper official from the COVID-19 response team, Department of Public Safety Secretary Erik Hooks, left in July.

Cohen worked in D.C.

In November 2020, Cohen’s name was floated by national media outlets as a possible Biden administration appointee. She previously worked in the Obama administration before coming to North Carolina.

“I am focused here on making sure the folks in North Carolina stay safe, particularly around the holidays, and I’m going to keep focused on that,” Cohen told reporters at the time. She said she “would be honored” to continue serving in North Carolina or in the federal government, “if that is an opportunity.”

Cooper said at the time that Cohen was “doing an amazing job here. We are fortunate she agreed to come and join my administration in 2017, but I think she is keeping her head down and doing what she needs to do to move our state forward,” he said.

Cooper said in 2020 he could see why she would be considered because of her handling of the state’s coronavirus response.

“Anybody would be fortunate to have Dr. Cohen, and of course I want her right here,” Cooper said.

Cohen has also been a major proponent of Cooper’s priority to expand Medicaid in the state. While it was part of final state budget negotiations this fall, it was not in the final budget because of a lack of House Republican support, according to House Speaker Tim Moore.

She attended Cornell University as an undergraduate, graduated from Yale Medical School and earned a master’s in public health at Harvard, where she concentrated on health care leadership.