Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald.

Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald resigned Wednesday as director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, shortly after publication of a news report that she bought shares of a tobacco company after assuming office—an apparent conflict of interest for the head of the nation's top public health agency.

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services spokesman Matt Lloyd said in a statement, “Dr. Fitzgerald owns certain complex financial interests that have imposed a broad recusal limiting her ability to complete all of her duties as the CDC director.” HHS oversees the CDC. “Due to the nature of these financial interests, Dr. Fitzgerald could not divest from them in a definitive time period.” Lloyd said HHS Secretary Alex Azar, the former drug company executive who was just sworn into office earlier this week, accepted the resignation after Fitzgerald “advised him of both the status of the financial interests and the scope of her recusal,” according to the statement.

Fitzgerald, trained as an obstetrician-gynecologist, had been head of the Georgia Department of Public Health since 2011 before joining the Atlanta-based CDC last summer. A career in politics proceeded that, according to a July 2017 Atlanta Journal-Constitution article. She was appointed to the position by previous HHS chair Tom Price, who resigned in September after traveling on private jets at the public expense.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal published on Wednesday, Fitzgerald was quoted saying that she resigned because she felt the investment issue was becoming a distraction for the agency. She told the news organization that selling investments in an electronic medical records company and a cancer screening company that were part of her husband's retirement account had proved difficult.

The resignation comes less than a day after Politico reported that Fitzgerald bought shares in Japan Tobacco within a month of assuming leadership of the agency in early July. Among its missions, the CDC is tasked with reducing and preventing tobacco use, which the CDC says on its own website is the “leading cause of preventable disease, disability and death in the United States.”

In addition to the tobacco stock purchase, Fitzgerald invested in at least a dozen other companies between assuming office on July 7 and September, according to the Politico report. These companies included Merck & Co., Bayer, Humana and US Foods Holding Co., the news outlet reported. Her ethics agreement discloses interests in more than 100 energy, health care, food and beverage and other companies.

According to Politico, Fitzgerald was already under scrutiny for failing to timely divest the other holdings she bought before joining the CDC that likewise could have posed conflicts of interest.

Earlier in her career, Fitzgerald served as a health care policy adviser to U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Newt Gingrich and U.S. Sen. Paul Coverdell, both Republicans from Georgia. She also ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 1992 and 1994 and later served on the Georgia Board of Education.

At the CDC, Fitzgerald succeeded Dr. Anne Schuchat, who had been the agency's acting director since January 2017. According to another Politico report citing an internal CDC email shared with the news organization, Schuchat will again resume the acting director role, effective immediately.