Outgoing CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, who made my list of the worst COVID-19 offenders despite being a transparently ditzy puppet rather than an evil mastermind, made one last appearance on Capitol Hill earlier this week before departing the revolving door to join the board of some multinational pharmaceutical corporation.
Via Stat News:
One of the very last duties of one of President Biden’s very first pandemic response officials was to spend two hours deflecting Republican criticisms of how she did her job.
GOP lawmakers took predictable shots at Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky over her comments about whether Covid-19 vaccines prevent transmission of the disease, how much influence teachers’ unions had over guidance for protocols in schools, and the agency’s data collection practices. House Republicans had been asking Walensky to testify for two months.
Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) brought up collusion between social media companies and the government — as the Twitter Files, which we would likely never have been privy to had Elon Musk not bought the company, exposed — to censor factual COVID misinformation in the interest of furthering lockdowns, masking mandates, vax mandates, etc.
She sidestepped thorny issues about gain of function research raised by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) by referring questions to the National Institutes of Health, which she does not oversee, and questions from Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) about CDC officials’ relationships with social media companies regarding vaccine misinformation by saying that the matter was being litigated in the court, so she couldn’t comment on it publicly. The hearing Tuesday was before the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability.
Like she did multiple times throughout her testimony, Walensky declined to supply an answer when asked about how her agency apparently violated the First Amendment under the guise of fighting “misinformation” while, ironically, the CDC pushed out its own misinformation such as the shots being totally safe (a lie), the shots stopping transmission (another lie that Walensky tried to quibble over), the efficacy of masking, etc.
How these people are allowed to openly defy the authority of elected members of Congress by prevaricating over direct questions they should be able to provide clear answers to is forever beyond me. What is the point of these theatrical productions if the witnesses are permitted to never actually answer questions with “yes” or “no” answers?
Walensky’s replacement — who, as I previously reported, giggled about arbitrarily locking down the public during her time as North Carolina HHS head on a whim based on off-the-record conversations with other Public Health™ officials — is unlikely to show any more respect for the taxpayers who subsidize her position.
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