Palm Beach County's top health official, Dr. Alina Alonso, ends 33-year public health career

Chris Persaud, Palm Beach Post
·3 min read

Palm Beach County’s top health official will retire Tuesday after a decades-long career in public health dealing with some of the worst diseases known to humans and capped by a once-in-a-century pandemic.

County Health Director Dr. Alina Alonso, 66, is leaving after 33 years with the state-run health department, including about 14 years as its chief. COVID-19 dominated her last few years leading the department as she guided her home county through the pandemic. But even before then, Alonso and her agency had been tested by microscopic killers that grabbed national headlines.

Who will take over for Dr. Alina Alonso?

Alonso will be succeeded by Dr. Jyothi Gunta, 42, medical director for a Concentra Urgent Care office in Delray Beach since 2018. She has worked as a physician at the West Palm Beach Veterans Affairs Hospital. She did a two-year residency with the county Health Department in pubic health and she has a master’s degree in public health from Nova Southeastern University. Before that, she attended medical school at the North-Western State Medical University in St. Petersburg, Russia, for medical school.

Dr. Alina Alonso addresses the school board in 2020 at the height of the pandemic.
Dr. Alina Alonso addresses the school board in 2020 at the height of the pandemic.

“She will make a great new director,” Alonso said during a Dec. 6 Palm Beach County Commission meeting where she publicly introduced Gunta to county commissioners. Alonso said she was “thrilled” to see Gunta’s name among candidates to replace her.

The Florida Department of Health wouldn’t allow Alonso to be interviewed for this article before her retirement.

Alonso is praised for helping low-income people during the pandemic

For much of COVID, nonprofits and clinics for the poor praised her dedication to helping people who lack easy access to good health care and had trouble getting inoculated when coronavirus vaccines were scarce.

When Florida's largest free clinic, the Caridad Center west of Boynton Beach, couldn’t get the vaccines in early 2021, CEO Laura Kallus said Alonso came through for her corps of volunteer medical staff.

“She put us on the list to get vaccines,” Kallus said. “I will be forever grateful because once I got my doctors vaccinated, they came back to provide care.”

While Alonso has received accolades for trying to help the underserved, she’s also been criticized by Glades residents suffering from sugar cane burning pollution that scientists have shown is deadly to people in the impoverished region. And she has repeatedly declined to answer questions from The Palm Beach Post about it.

A profile:‘We were just going to handle it’: How this Florida doctor became a public face of COVID-19

USA Today honoree:Dr. Alina Alonso, stellar choice

More:Sugar cane burn season still blankets Glades with smoke after study showing it kills people

The Stop the Burn Go Green Harvest Campaign, comprised of current and former Glades residents, accused Alonso and her agency of “shielding Big Sugar” in 2021 and again in 2022 after The Post and ProPublica published an investigation indicating that the region’s air was dirtier than what an air monitor run by county health officials reported during sugar cane harvesting season.

“Director Dr. Alina Alonso's failure to respond to or address public health issues related to the smoke and ash that pervades the Glades and beyond would be hard to believe if we were not well-versed in Big Sugar's manipulation of state agencies and their leaders,” the campaign said.

Stop The Burn didn't specify that they believe sugar growers influenced Alonso. The group blasted a wide range of institutions in its statement, including Congress, Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Palm Beach County School Board.

“It is with my pleasure that I leave but I am not going away,” she said during a Feb. 7 county commission meeting where commissioners honored her work in tackling health scares such as COVID, anthrax, Zika, HIV/AIDS and swine flu. “I’m going to continue in the private sector, continue working for health equity and to eliminate the disparities we have in every community. And I will continue to do that here in Palm Beach County.”

Chris Persaud is The Palm Beach Post's data reporter. Email him at cpersaud@pbpost.com. Click @ChrisMPersaud and follow him on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Palm Beach County's top health official, Dr. Alina Alonso, retires