George Gao Fu, the head of China's Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), is stepping down from his position leading the institution and will be replaced by Shen Hongbing, a prominent public health expert, the CDC announced on Tuesday.
In a statement, the CDC attributed the 60-year-old Gao's retirement to his age, even though many Chinese officials stay in office well into their 60s and even beyond. His successor Shen is only two years his junior.
A top health official on Tuesday said he hoped the centre's new leadership would bring about "reforms" at the institution, including a closer adherence to President Xi Jinping's directives.
Do you have questions about the biggest topics and trends from around the world? Get the answers with SCMP Knowledge, our new platform of curated content with explainers, FAQs, analyses and infographics brought to you by our award-winning team.
During a meeting of CDC officials on Tuesday, Gao said that "as someone working in the sciences, [he] would continue to devote energy to the advancement of disease control and the development of public health" even after his departure.
Wang Hesheng, China's top official for infectious disease control, was quoted by the CDC's readout of the meeting as praising Gao for his contributions to public health, including his "leadership of all the centre's staff during the coronavirus pandemic response". Gao's tenure as CDC chief began in 2017.
Shen, Gao's successor, is a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and a former president of Nanjing Medical University.
Wang, who serves as vice-minister of the National Health Commission, said he hoped that Shen, along with several other newly appointed officials at the CDC, would "lead the [CDC's] expansive body of workers in furthering the reform and development of the CDC".
Among Wang's hopes for such reforms was that the CDC would "have a clear-cut stance on politics, comprehensively strengthen the [Chinese Communist] Party's leadership [of the CDC] ... and implement General Secretary Xi Jinping's major directives and instructions to the letter."
The leadership overhaul at the CDC comes as China continues to grapple with low vaccination rates among its elderly population, while implementing a zero-Covid strategy that included a stringent lockdown of Shanghai earlier this year.
Only 61 per cent of those aged above 80 have received their primary vaccinations, health officials said last week, and only 38 per cent of people in that age group have received a booster shot.