The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky recently announced her resignation effective June 30th. There are many possible explanations for her unexpected departure, but frankly I think she’s just had enough.
It has been a tumultuous time to be the CDC Director. She took over the job in January, 2021, about one year after the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. She was appointed by new President Joe Biden, replacing the Trump Administration Director Robert Redfield. It didn’t take long for Walensky to feel the heat of the new occupant of the White House.
At the time, the public schools in most states were closed as teachers unions refused to return to the classrooms without additional protections and money. With millions of students trying to get by with online learning that everyone knew was inadequate, the pressure was mounting for a solution. I wrote about what happened next in a February, 2021, blog post called CDC Director Caves to Politics. Here is a portion of that post:
“Dr. Rochelle Walensky didn’t know any better. As the newly appointed Director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) she didn’t realize that politics comes before science. So, she did that rare thing in Washington – she told the truth.
In an article published January 26th in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), three researchers from the CDC found “little evidence that schools have contributed meaningfully to increased community transmission” of the coronavirus. The CDC researchers looked at more than 90,000 students in 11 North Carolina districts and found that only 32 students and staff members were infected in school, while 773 got infected during the same period out of school. The science was clear; reopening schools was safe for children and teachers.
Then Dr. Walensky made her big mistake. On February 3rd, she announced these findings to the press. She made it clear that the science supported reopening schools. In her statement she said, “Vaccination of teachers is not a prerequisite for safe reopening of schools.” This was a direct refutation of the demands being made by teachers unions before they would return to the classrooms. When asked about her statement, White House press secretary Jen Psaki responded Dr. Walensky was speaking “in her personal capacity” and not as the director of the CDC. In other words, Dr. Walensky hadn’t cleared her statement with the White House. Even though she was their newly appointed scientist to lead the nation’s largest organization for disease prevention, she was not considered the final authority on disease and safety.”
Since that day, Dr. Walensky has had to live with the truth that she doesn’t have the last word on what the science says; the non-scientists at the White House have the last word. After two and a half years I believe she has decided she can no longer tolerate this situation. Sadly, she should have refused to give in to the White House or resigned two and a half years ago and she might have spared herself and the nation the misinformation we all endured.
And it is misinformation that she is now concerned about. In an interview with Sarah Toy of The Wall Street Journal, Dr. Walensky gave a warning for the American people: Be on guard against misinformation and the politicization of science. She wants Americans to make health decisions based on “their own risk assessment and their own personal risks, but not through politics,” she said.
This sounds like someone who has finally come to grips with her own participation in the politicization of science. It can safely be said that politics has never before played a larger role in the response to a national medical emergency than it did with Covid-19. This may be due in part to the polarization of our country today, which has not been this bad since the Civil War. Research by the Kaiser Family Foundation has concluded that political partisanship was a stronger national predictor of Covid-19 vaccination than any other demographic factor. People on the right were more suspicious of CDC pandemic guidance on quarantines, distancing, and masking compared with the left, while Democrats were more likely to be vaccinated than Republicans.
Critics have contended that the CDC itself is politicized, that its recommendations and policies were influenced by politics and that it gave conflicting recommendations to the public. Count me among those critics. When the CDC, the nation’s leading authority on infectious diseases, colludes with Randi Weingarten and the American Federation of Teachers union to make recommendations for schools, you know there is political influence on a grand scale. About a quarter of Americans said they lacked trust in the CDC’s health recommendations, according to a 2022 survey of about 4,200 people published in the journal Health Affairs in early 2023.
Walensky said she hopes Americans will also better fact-check the information they receive, given the high levels of politicization and misinformation in health and science. She encouraged people to check things they are hearing with other trusted sources, such as academic institutions or societies and their physicians. This is a tacit admission that we can no longer trust our public health institutions, largely as a result of her tenure as the CDC Director. I can assure her that most Americans have already learned this lesson.
Under Walensky’s leadership, the agency has placed a renewed focus on modernizing its data-collection infrastructure and advocated for additional funding and more authority on mandating data collection from states. In light of these initiatives, Walensky’s announcement that she would be stepping down at the end of June took some by surprise. Walenksy said it was clear to her that the CDC’s projects would need to span numerous directors and administrations. “This felt like the right time to pass that baton to somebody with new energy, who hadn’t felt the heaviness of this position for the prior two and a half years,” she said. Dr. Mandy Cohen, former North Carolina health secretary, will succeed her.
One has to wonder how long it will be before Dr. Cohen has had enough?
