Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald, the new director of the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is facing questions about an apparent financial conflict of interest that could be preventing her from being able to carry out parts of her job. 

Senator Patty Murray, D-WA, the senior Democrat on the Senate committee that oversees the CDC, has questioned elements in Fitzgerald’s ethics statement that Murray says raise questions about Fitzgerald’s ability to function effectively. 

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An ABC News report says that while Fitzgerald became director of the CDC in July, and was required to sell a range of stocks she owned, she said in an Associated Press interview that “I’ve done everything that they’ve requested, in a timely manner as they've requested. My financial people tell me we have now sold all the stocks.”

However, while the stocks that were sold included beer and soda companies, the tobacco company Philip Morris International, and a number of health care companies such as vaccine manufacturers and health-care companies, her ethics statement noted unresolved financial holdings that could prevent her from talking about cancer and prescription drug monitoring programs, Murray wrote. 

“I am concerned that you cannot perform the role of CDC Director while being largely recused from matters pertaining to cancer and opioids, two of the most pervasive and urgent health challenges we face as a country,” wrote Murray, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Committee of Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, which oversees the CDC. 

In a Washington Post report, Murray wrote that by her reading of the ethics agreement, Fitzgerald is unable to engage in “key matters relating to cancer,” the second leading cause of death in the United States. Murray said Fitzgerald may also be unable to respond to the opioid crisis “given your apparent conflict with regard to opioids” and specifically with state-based electronic databases used to track and monitor the use of opioids. 

She then called on Fitzgerald to release additional information and to meet with the committee about the issue.

Fitzgerald has dismissed those concerns, saying that if a particular conflict arose, it would be handled by someone else at the agency. In addition, CDC spokeswoman Katherine Lyon-Daniel was quoted saying in an e-mail that “Dr. Fitzgerald is able to speak about PDMPs [prescription drug monitoring programs] as a tool in the opioid response, and she will continue to speak about the opioid public health emergency in general.”

The Post asked Don Fox, acting director and general counsel at the Office of Government Ethics during President Barack Obama's administration, to review Fitzgerald’s financial disclosure and ethics agreement and the CDC’s response. According to the report, Fox says that the wording suggests that HHS ethics officials “have concluded that right now, she has to recuse herself from dealing with a particular policy or strategy on either PDMPs or on the opioid crisis. The important thing here is what the ethics officials are not saying,” he adds. “They’re not saying she can work on anything to do with PDMPs or the opioid crisis.”

Fox adds that, based on his federal government ethics experience, it was unusual that “you would go ahead and appoint someone who had significant parts of the job that they were unable to do, and where there is no visibility as to how long that situation would persist.”