Former CDC director Rochelle Walensky on her biggest takeaways from the COVID-19 pandemic.
r. Rochelle Walensky became director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in January 2021, a fraught time in the country’s public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Americans’ confidence in the nation’s leading public health organization was at an all-time low, and Walensky had to not only manage the national response but rebuild public trust at the same time.
Well, it’s been an extraordinary tenure. When I came in, it was really about getting the agency, country, and world out of the darkest days of the pandemic. Certainly, I knew I was coming in to conquer COVID-19. I really did not expect that there would be so many people who were working to undermine the message of science, the message of public health—nefarious actors who really were working to undermine what good health would look like for individuals and for the country. That was harder than I thought it would be.
One of the things that has been challenging is as a scientist—I know science changes. That is the purpose of science. That is the goal—to have more and more science emerge to have one question that is answered, then link to another question that needs to be asked. I don’t know that America was feeling that way.
I really appreciate this question, because I think that this is lost on not only the American public, but even scientists who are asking for things from CDC. This is among the things we are doing in CDC Moving Forward—and asking for Congressional help so we can be a nimble agency. We have real challenges in our workforce, in our ability to pay overtime, our ability to pay danger pay.
To be very clear, we’re not looking for protected individual data. We want to be able to see an infectious threat or a non-infectious threat when it happens. If we were to have one case of disease X show up in a hospital and another case of disease X show up in a neighboring county in a hospital, if they both don’t report it to us, we can’t say, ‘wait a minute, there’s something going on locally.’ And they each think that they have the only case that’s out there.
But I do think having a fresh perspective, having a network in infectious diseases that I was able to call upon, was clearly beneficial to me as well.
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