BREAKING: Health director Gibbie Harris to retire
Harris was the public face of the county’s Covid response; She will be replaced at start of 2022 by her deputy, Raynard Washington
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by Tony Mecia and Cristina Bolling
Mecklenburg County Health Director Gibbie Harris, who led the county through its response to the Covid crisis, is retiring at the end of the year.
County Manager Dena Diorio made the announcement at the end of Wednesday night’s county commissioners meeting. Harris will be replaced by deputy public health director Raynard Washington, who came to the health department from Philadelphia right as the pandemic was beginning in early 2020.
Harris is in her late 60s and has been in healthcare for more than four decades. She came from Asheville, joined Mecklenburg County in 2017 and finished up here in a role that at the start of the pandemic made her perhaps the most powerful and visible local official.
At the end of tonight’s county commissioners meeting, Harris said:
This has been a difficult decision for me. Public health is my passion. This county has been good to public health since I’ve been here. … It’s been a real opportunity to get public health out there and to do the things that we know make a difference in this community.
Commissioners Chairman George Dunlap immediately responded: “Well, I’m just going to tell you that this is conditional. The condition is, when you go to Asheville full-time, you promise not to work for them.”
Harris replied: “This will be my second retirement, so we’ll see if I can make this one stick.”
County leaders have consistently praised Harris’ leadership during Covid. She was the county’s public face of the response and regularly briefed leaders and held frequent news conferences. She came across not as a politician but as somebody who spoke her mind, and she spoke with a consistent, steady voice on the dangers of Covid — sometimes expressing exasperation that the public wasn’t following her department’s recommendations.
Some residents, though, found her recommendations to be overly aggressive, and she disappointed some parents who favored children in classrooms by failing to make a clear recommendation to school leaders — even as she privately expressed in emails to colleagues that she thought kids should be in school. In January, with cases surging, she recommended classrooms remained closed to students in what seemed like flip-flop but that she said was not.
Harris, a former nurse, crafted Mecklenburg’s March 2020 stay-at-home order mostly by herself, and it went into effect a few days before the state followed her lead with its own stay-at-home order. The order, which shut businesses and commanded residents to stay at home (with a number of exceptions), wound up being in line with what most major cities and states wound up doing.
Washington is an epidemiologist who most recently served as chief epidemiologist with Philadelphia’s department of public health. He joined Mecklenburg County in March 2020. He has occasionally filled in for Harris at news conferences.
Raynard Washington, who has a Ph.D. in epidemiology, will take over the county health department when Gibbie Harris retires at the end of the year. (Photo from Washington’s LinkedIn page)
Speaking to commissioners on Wednesday night, he said: “It is an honor of mine to be a part of Gibbie’s legacy here in Mecklenburg County. She definitely has smaller feet than I do, but she’s leaving some big shoes for me to fill.”
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Executive editor: Tony Mecia; Managing editor: Cristina Bolling; Contributing editor: Tim Whitmire, CXN Advisory