“When I was in high school, my dad almost died after vacationing in Mexico. I was staggered you could travel to a neighboring country, get deathly ill, and be treated by brilliant doctors who didn’t know what to do. The situation made me think, ‘This is a problem I need to be solving.’ ” 

“My College classmates would tell you I was pretty focused. The opportunities for learning were unbelievable. There was a clarity to my purpose.”

“Initially at the CDC, I was part of a program that was Sherlock Holmes meets Indiana Jones. We were charged with solving medical mysteries of emerging outbreaks all over the world—trying to detect, respond, and prevent them, then mitigate the impacts.” 

“In my last 10 years at the CDC, we were starting to battle diseases that were broader in scope, more frequent, more intense. Their impact went beyond health. It disrupted society and economies.”

“Public health interests, people’s interests, political interests, and private-sector interests must be in harmony rather than deep tension. Each of the ‘Four Ps’ must understand and respect the role of the other. If one exerts too much pressure or views another as an enemy, the resulting divisiveness takes focus away from the emerging virus that’s killing people.”

“Most anti-mRNA vaccine folks mistakenly believe mRNA technology is too new to be trusted. I was working on it in the 1970s. People should understand mRNA took decades of rigorous science before vaccine pushes in 2002 and 2020. It wasn’t a shot in the dark.”

“Science will never overcome ruptured health literacy, the impact of poverty in a broken healthcare system, or the devastation of trust. Disease overcomes communities when there is a bankruptcy of trust because what people believe is even more powerful than what they know.”

“When asked how to ensure health literacy, I used to recommend the CDC website. I can’t do that anymore. I read a lot of historical work by Howard Markel, and now I’m recommending Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees. It reminds us of the importance of connectedness.”

“Withdrawing the U.S. from the World Health Organization is a terrible idea. Believing we can act alone is naive. There is no wall big enough to protect us from increasingly lethal threats. The only way to do that is through global cooperation.”

“We need to pay a lot more attention to ‘bird flu,’ H5N1. We don’t know when viruses such as this adapt enough to jump from animals and become effectively transmitted. We don’t know what the virulence of the pathogen will look like when it spreads human to human, but the potential lethality in humans is much higher than Covid. With Covid, we didn’t have enough humility about the pathogen.”

“If we maintain the distrust and the mis- and disinformation that are prevalent now, we will be killing ourselves in the process.” 

Notable Achievements of “Marty” Citron 

Inspired by working on the human genome in lab of late biology professor Bob Gross, completed A.B. in biochemistry in three years, then spent senior fellowship studying molecular genetics before M.D. at Tufts, residency at University of Virginia, and further training at University of Washington

Joined CDC in 1992 and spent two years with its Epidemic Intelligence Service; served as director, division of global migration and quarantine, 2003-22; consults from New Hampshire, where he lives with wife Maya; father of two adult children