Dr. Rochelle Walensky has an important message for the citizens of the United States as she leaves after a disastrous tenure as head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Watch out for “misinformation” and “avoid politicizing the science”.
No, seriously.
In one of his last discussions as head of the CDC, he emphasized in an interview with The Wall Street Journal the importance of making health decisions guided by individual risk assessments and personal risk factors, not influenced by politics.
Walensky now says he wants Americans to make health decisions based on “their own risk assessment and their own personal risks, but not through politics.”
This is an about-face from the CDC’s unique guidance issued during the Covid pandemic, which saw the agency advocate new mRNA vaccines for all age groups, regardless of immunity antibodies natural or health profiles. In fact, advanced analysis shows that Covid was never more dangerous to the young than the seasonal flu, but the CDC continued to push vaccines for those as young as 6 months, even going so far as to recommend it for the calendar of childhood vaccination. despite serious adverse events known as heart inflammation.
Such questionable decision-making left the agency open to accusations that it was boosting Big Pharma’s profits at the expense of prudent medical science. This alleged “regulatory capture” led to a collapse of confidence among Americans. This increasingly common view that the CDC was complicit was exacerbated when emails emerged showing that the CDC had coordinated with teachers’ unions to make scientifically dubious mask recommendations for young children.
CDC guidance under Dr. Walensky was marked by decision-making that goes against caution and medical science; So it seems that a patient-centered approach that takes into account multiple factors that a physician should consider when assessing a patient’s risk profile was the right thing all along. Who would have appreciated it.
This is not Walensky’s first mea culpa. In a March 2022 address at his alma mater, the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, spoke about the “lessons learned” from the Covid pandemic in a frank and humble way.
One of the most surprising moments is when the CDC director effectively confesses that the agency is not the final authority on “the science.”
“Nobody said ‘waning’ when this vaccine is going to work, ‘well, maybe it’s going to wear off.’ I said ‘let’s lead with science’… I think the public heard it as ‘science is infallible’. Science is black and white.’… The truth is that science is gray. And science is not always immediate”.
This is the CDC director pushing for participation through the “the science is settled” narrative. However, his agency engaged in the “pre-bunking” of medical “disinformation,” as he confessed in the recent WSJ interview.
This “pre-bunking” has led to embarrassments for the CDC when it has gotten the science wrong, even in the face of medical experts advising opposite directions. One such example was admitted when Dr. Walensky admitted that the Covid vaccines decreased in effectiveness; however, at the same time, the agency neglected the robust and longer-lasting protection that natural immunity offers.
The CDC and other health authorities also consistently misled the public throughout the pandemic by claiming or implying that Covid vaccines stopped or significantly slowed the spread, when the truth was that the drug companies allegedly never even tested this property immunological, nor was there. any substantial evidence to support the false claim.
Dr. Walensky’s tenure as CDC director was thus marked by political divisions. Red states tended to resist the agency’s advice on quarantine measures, social distancing and face masks during the pandemic more than their blue-state counterparts. In red states that ignored the CDC and the advice of other public health officials like Dr. Anthony Fauci, when adjusted for health factors like age and obesity rates, the results turned out to be comparably insignificant with the blue states that imposed harsh lockdowns, mask mandates. , and vaccine mandates for public workers. Many Americans, rightly, saw the draconian blue state measures as a violation of their constitutional rights and an abuse of emergency powers by blue state governors and legislatures.
However, Walensky said in the interview that public health should not fall along partisan lines.
“Some of our biggest differences were based on jurisdictions and how they voted,” Walensky said of the Covid-19 vaccination rates.
However, Democrats showed a greater propensity for vaccination than Republicans, as the survey data revealed. Political division emerged as an important determinant of Covid-19 vaccination rates, even more so than other demographic factors, as KFF, formerly known as the Kaiser Family Foundation, claimed.
Castrucci, president and CEO of the Beaumont Foundation, a nonpartisan philanthropic organization focused on public health, noted to the WSJ that the CDC is inherently political because its director is chosen by the president.
At the same time, he said, it was an easy scapegoat for political leaders during the pandemic because it was a relatively unknown entity to Americans.
“It was this agency with no name and no face to the public,” he remarked.
Before the pandemic, the CDC functioned primarily as an advisor to state and local health authorities, provided grants, and published research and scientific data. However, the pandemic pushed the CDC into a new public-facing role, Castrucci noted.
Before leaving her position in June, which she took somewhat off guard, Dr. Walensky focused on improving CDC’s data collection infrastructure and advocated for additional resources and authority to mandate data collection by states.
In an embarrassing moment in her final congressional testimony as CDC director, she admitted that the agency had no state-level data to back up the public health pronouncements it issued to the nation.
“Nationally we have never been able to get hospitalization, vaccination and COVID [data]… We did not obtain aggregated data on vaccinations and hospitalizations. All this data that you are filling in the EHR does not translate into public health data,’ he confessed.
Dr. Mandy Cohen, the former health secretary of North Carolina, is lined up to succeed her. As for his next steps, Walensky intends to spend more time with his family and consider his future endeavors. He warned that despite improvements, the United States is still not ready for another pandemic, advocating for increased funding and better public health infrastructure.
“It’s been raining infectious diseases since the day I got here,” he said. “We’re better than we were and we’re not where we need to be.”
The American people might object that it has been raining bad decisions on the CDC during each of its responses to the pandemic. The only umbrella we have is the Constitution. We better hold on to it or we’ll all end up wet.
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OPINION: This article contains comments that reflect the opinion of the author.
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