On Friday, Rochelle Walensky, the embattled director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, announced her resignation. She stated that with the declining impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was an opportune time to leave. Her last day will be June 30.
“I have never been prouder of anything I have done in my professional career,” she wrote in her resignation letter.
Despite her troubled tenure as head of the CDC, Joe Biden had nothing but praise for Walensky.
“Dr. Walensky has saved lives with her steadfast and unwavering focus on the health of every American. As Director of the CDC, she led a complex organization on the frontlines of a once-in-a-generation pandemic with honesty and integrity,” Biden said in a statement. “She marshalled [sic] our finest scientists and public health experts to turn the tide on the urgent crises we’ve faced.”
Walensky’s two-year stint as head of the CDC was rife with controversy. Despite studies showing that mask mandates did virtually nothing to stop or slow the spread of COVID-19, she insisted that masks can “help prevent the spread of COVID-19 by reducing your chance of infection by more than 80 percent.”
In the summer of 2021, the CDC acknowledged that “multiple studies have shown that transmission within school settings is typically lower than — or at least similar to — levels of community transmission when prevention strategies are in place in schools.” Yet after teachers’ unions lobbied the CDC to keep the mask mandates in schools, the CDC caved to the teachers’ unions, then released a bogus study that claimed mask mandates were effective as cover.
Last year, the CDC discovered a “mistake” and curiously “revised” pediatric deaths from COVID-19 down 24%. As PJM’s Kevin Downey Jr. noted, this was well after Walensky “used the data to recommend vaccines for kids 5 to 7 years old back in November of 2021. Funny how that worked out.” In other words, she used false data to scare parents to get their kids vaccinated.
On Walenksy’s watch, trust in the CDC plummeted. Last year, a poll found that only 44% of Americans trust what the CDC says about COVID. While it’s true that party ID played a significant role in that perception (69% of Democrats trust the CDC, and only 22% of Republicans do), the influence of politics on public health matters seems to be directly connected to the party in power.
On top of everything else, under the leadership of Walensky, COVID deaths reached their highest levels ever.
While Walensky’s departure is a welcome development, I am concerned that someone even worse will replace her.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member