Director, Division of Global Migration Health

CAPT David Fitter, MD

CAPT David Fitter, MD is the director of the Division of Global Migration Health (DGMH) at the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases (NCEZID). He previously served as the chief for the Immunization Systems Branch at the Center for Global Health.

During the COVID-19 response, he served as principal deputy incident manager and co-led the Vaccine Task Force, where he oversaw efforts to ready public health departments for the distribution, storage, and administration of vaccines. That important work included the implementation of data-sharing systems that tracked vaccination campaigns down to the ZIP code level, helping get vaccine doses to people in remote areas. For his vaccine leadership in the response, Dr. Fitter was honored with a Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medal (also known as the “Sammies” – the “Oscars” of federal government service).

Prior to joining CDC, Dr. Fitter served as a healthcare provider at a hospital in Gabon and at an outpatient HIV/AIDS clinic in South Africa. He helped establish the reproductive health offices in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Benin and worked with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Rwanda. Dr. Fitter joined CDC in 2011 as an Epidemic Intelligence Service officer, working mainly in Haiti for the Emergency Response and Recovery Branch, serving later as medical officer and team lead. From 2016–2019, he took on two lead roles in Haiti, as country director and as program director for the Division of Global Health Protection. Dr. Fitter has deployed for CDC to emergencies in countries across Africa, including in the 2014–2016 West Africa Ebola outbreak. When the Syrian civil war escalated in 2013, he deployed to neighboring Turkey to support an international polio vaccination campaign in northern Syria and efforts to control disease outbreaks common in crisis regions.

Dr. Fitter’s training includes an undergraduate degree from Johns Hopkins University, a Doctor of Medicine from the University of Chicago, and internal medicine residency at Yale.  He is adjunct faculty at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health and has practiced medicine at a community health center, providing primary care to people with poor access to healthcare.