Céline Gounder, MD, ScM, FIDSA
Why subscribe?
In medicine, an underlying condition is an illness you already have that makes the next one more dangerous. In this country, the most important underlying conditions aren’t in your medical chart. They’re where you live, what you earn, what your job does to your body, and who made the rules about all three.
I’m Dr. Céline Gounder, an internist, infectious disease physician, epidemiologist, and journalist. I’ve treated patients in city hospitals and on tribal lands, worked in global health emergencies, run a city tuberculosis program, advised policymakers, and reported on it all. Public health and health policy decide who gets protected and who pays for the gaps.
This newsletter looks for the health story inside the news everyone is already talking about. I’ll tell you what the evidence shows, what it doesn’t, and who has the power to change it. A TV segment gives me two minutes, so the fuller story and every source go here.
Subscribe to follow my reporting across CBS News, KFF Health News, my podcasts, and here.
My Bio
Internist, infectious disease specialist, epidemiologist, and medical journalist
I am a CBS News medical correspondent and the Editor-at-Large for Public Health at KFF Health News. I am also a Clinical Associate Professor of Medicine and Infectious Diseases at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine. I am also a member of NYU Stern’s Volatility and Risk Institute’s Faculty Advisory Board.
Prior to joining CBS, I was a CNN Medical Analyst and a guest expert on numerous other networks.
From November 9, 2020 to January 20, 2021, I served on the Biden-Harris Transition COVID-19 Advisory Board.
I’ve cared for patients everywhere from Bellevue Hospital Center to Indian Health Service and tribal health facilities in the southwest and far northeast of the United States to Appalachia. In early 2015, I spent two months volunteering as an Ebola aid worker in Guinea.
Early in my career, I worked in Brazil and southern Africa on screening for tuberculosis in high-risk HIV-infected and -uninfected populations, validating novel tests and algorithms for tuberculosis diagnosis and expedited treatment, and drug-drug interactions among pregnant women with TB and HIV. While on faculty at Johns Hopkins, I was the Director for Delivery for the Gates Foundation-funded Consortium to Respond Effectively to the AIDS/TB Epidemic. I went on to serve as Assistant Commissioner of Health for Tuberculosis at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
I received my BA in Molecular Biology from Princeton University, my Master of Science in Epidemiology from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and my MD from the University of Washington. I was an intern and resident in Internal Medicine at Harvard’s Massachusetts General Hospital, and a post-doctoral fellow in Infectious Diseases at Johns Hopkins University.
I was elected a fellow of the Infectious Diseases Society of America in 2016. In 2017, People Magazine named me one of 25 Women Changing the World. In 2021, InStyle Magazine named me one of 50 Women Making the World a Better Place. In 2023, I was named one of New York City & State’s Health Care Power 100, a New York State Woman of Distinction, and a National Academy of Medicine Emerging Leader in Health and Medicine. In 2023, I was also elected to the National Academy of Medicine and as a lifetime member to the Council on Foreign Relations; I also received the Research!America Meeting the Moment for Public Health Award . My podcast production team and I won the 2023 Edward R. Murrow Award for a podcast by a small digital organization for American Diagnosis S4E5 “Power to Police Perpetrators.” In 2024, I joined the Board of Research!America and the Communication Initiative Advisory Panel of the Coalition for Trust in Health and Science.
I was married to my college sweetheart, Grant Wahl, from 2001 until his untimely death in December 2022, when he was covering the men’s World Cup in Doha, Qatar. He died at the age of 49 from the rupture of a slowly growing, undetected ascending aortic aneurysm with hemopericardium.
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