A former tobacco industry executive has been appointed to senior leadership at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, alarming public health advocates and critics of industry influence on government.

Stephen Sayle, named in March as the CDC’s deputy director for legislative affairs, previously worked at Fontem Ventures, a subsidiary of the British multinational tobacco corporation Imperial Brands. Between 2017 and 2018, he was U.S. vice president of corporate affairs at Fontem, which is focused on non-combustible tobacco products like the e-cigarette brand blu and the oral nicotine pouch brand Zone.

From a public health perspective, appointing a former tobacco executive to a high-level role at the CDC is “unprecedented,” Timothy McAfee, who headed the Office of Smoking and Health at the CDC from 2010 to 2017, wrote in an editorial published this week in the journal Tobacco Control.McAfee told STAT that Sayle’s appointment is also “completely inconsistent” with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s previous pledges to “shut the revolving door” between industry and government.

Regardless of whether one agrees with Kennedy’s comments about the relative safety of oral nicotine pouches, McAfee said via email, “it should be 100% clear that we don’t want former tobacco industry executives working inside the nation’s public health agencies helping influence policy adoption,” McAfee said via email.

HHS cited Sayle’s legislative experience. “Mr. Sayle brings more than 25 years of experience working at senior levels of the federal government and will be a valuable asset at the CDC to ensure effective coordination with Congress,” Andrew Nixon, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, told STAT via email. “Like all HHS officials, he is required to comply with all applicable ethics laws and regulations.”

Sayle did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The news compounds concerns about the tobacco industry’s political influence under the current administration, said Kelsey Romeo-Stuppy, managing attorney at the anti-tobacco group Action on Smoking and Health.

“The federal regulation of tobacco in the U.S. has been gutted under the Trump administration,” Romeo-Stuppy said, noting the shuttering of the CDC’s Office of Smoking and Health last year. “This is just another step further in that direction of failing to protect Americans from the harms of tobacco, and in fact going in the opposite direction.”

The Trump administration has so far scuttled plans to ban menthol cigarettes and taken a more favorable stance toward flavored vapes. Trump vowed to “save vaping” during his presidential campaign, and Kennedy backs vaping as a harm-reduction strategy. “Vapes reduce cigarette tobacco smoking, which is much worse,” he said during a Congressional hearing last week. (Many tobacco researchers also support vaping as a tool to help quit cigarettes and lower cancer risk, while noting that e-cigarettes carry their own potential health hazards.)

Meanwhile, Altria Group and Reynolds American both donated to president Trump’s White House ballroom makeover, and Reynolds also donated $10 million to Trump’s super PAC in the 2024 election. Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, is a former lobbyist for the tobacco company Swisher International.

Sayle has been criticized over potential conflicts of interest while working in government before. After lobbying for Chevron and other energy companies, he worked from 2013 to 2015 as the staff director for the energy subcommittee on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.

“[O]ne can hardly imagine a more nihilistic and disturbing message to send than turning public health policy over, in part, to someone who has dedicated much of their career to maximizing the consumption of inherently unhealthy products,” Jeff Hauser, executive director of the watchdog group Revolving Door Project, said via email.

The public health implications of Sayle’s appointment go beyond tobacco, Hauser said: “People who have shown an eagerness to rationalize the interests of tobacco corporate profits over the health of the public are likely to be soft on all sorts of other issues in which profits are pitted against health.”

A previous CDC head, Brenda Fitzgerald, stepped down from her role in 2018 after Politico reported she had purchased tobacco stocks, which she said had been purchased without her knowledge by an investment manager.

Sayle does not hold shares in Imperial or have other investments in tobacco companies, according to an HHS official. But McAfee, the former OSH head who’s now a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, noted that Sayle’s quiet appointment to CDC stands in stark contrast to the controversy over Fitzgerald.

This spring, Sayle’s former employer Fontem U.S. filed a lawsuit against the FDA, Kennedy, and FDA Commissioner Marty Makary, alleging the FDA unlawfully stopped its application for the marketing authorization of its Zone oral nicotine pouches from moving forward. Fontem and ITG Brands, another U.S. subsidiary of Imperial, have an active history of lobbying over e-cigarette regulations and other issues.

McAfee recalled Kennedy’s frequent complaints about industry influence over federal health agencies. Sayle’s appointment at CDC, he said, is “opening a door that has been closed for decades, and letting the fox into the henhouse with open arms.”

Helen Branswell contributed reporting.

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