John Redd | CMO
The Medical Countermeasures Coalition

Dr. John Redd is an internist and medical epidemiologist who
served as the Chief Medical Officer (CMO) of the Office of the
Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) at
Health and Human Services Headquarters in Washington, DC
until he left government service in January 2022.
Dr. Redd began his HHS career in 1994, when he became a
general internist with the Indian Health Service (IHS) at the
Northern Navajo Medical Center in Shiprock, New Mexico. He
and his family lived on the Navajo Reservation for almost five
years. He began a 20-year uniformed career with the US Public
Health Service at CDC in 2000 as an Epidemic Intelligence
Service officer stationed with the New Mexico Department of
Health. After EIS he joined the Division of Viral Hepatitis at
CDC for six years, where he was instrumental in establishing
hepatitis C treatment in IHS through collaboration with Project ECHO. In a second stint with IHS, he
served as Chief of the Infectious Diseases Branch of the IHS Division of Epidemiology and Disease
Prevention, where he had a leadership role in the Agency response to the H1N1 influenza pandemic,
and as a clinical internist at the Santa Fe Indian Hospital. He re-joined CDC in 2014 as the liaison officer
between CDC and Sandia National Laboratories. He has supervised EIS officers and other public health
trainees since 2002 and was senior author of a Langmuir Prize-winning manuscript.
During the CDC Ebola response in West Africa, Dr. Redd served in multiple CDC leadership positions in
Sierra Leone, including Response Lead, Epidemiology Lead, and Acting Country Director. He joined the
Center for Global Health’s Division of Global Health Protection in 2015, where he served as Country
Manager for the Ebola-affected countries of Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia. He received the Public
Health Service Meritorious Service Medal and the State Department Superior Honor Award for his Ebola
service in Sierra Leone. He then moved to Washington, DC to serve as the liaison officer to ASPR from
CDC’s Center for Preparedness and Response.
In 2019, Dr. Redd joined ASPR as its Chief Medical Officer. During the COVID-19 response, he was a
field leader in the initial response to the pandemic in California and Japan, and then was appointed lead
of the Healthcare Resilience Task Force. He then led HHS teams supervising allocation and distribution
of new therapeutics, including remdesivir and monoclonal antibodies. For his service during the COVID-
19 response he received the United States Public Health Service Distinguished Service Medal, the
highest award presented by the United States Public Health Service. He retired as a captain in 2020.
Dr. Redd received his BA from Harvard College and his MD from the University of Texas Southwestern
Medical School in Dallas. He then completed a residency in Internal Medicine at Columbia-Presbyterian
Medical Center and earned a Master of Public Health in Epidemiology degree at Columbia University in
New York. He was elected a Fellow of the American College of Physicians in 2002 and was a 2010-2011
Public Health Leadership Institute Scholar. He is the co-author of over ninety publications.
In addition to his work with the Medical Countermeasures Coalition, Dr. Redd works as an independent
consultant (John T Redd LLC) and serves as Senior Advisor to the Jack D Hidary Foundation.