Washington, D.C. – The head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control admitted Wednesday that her agency's problems, magnified during its mishandling of the COVID pandemic, can only be remediated by what she called an ‘ambitious' overhaul.
Dr. Gail Walensky, former professor at Harvard Medical School and the one-time chief of Infectious Diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital said Wednesday that missteps during the most recent pandemic and the slow response to the spread of the disease known as “Monkeypox” have persuaded her significant changes are necessary.
CDC critics have long argued its COVID recommendations were often useless or counterproductive to stopping the virus from spreading. Sometimes both. One oft-cited example is its development of a test to detect the disease that failed to work after it was made available, potentially providing an inaccurate picture of the novel coronavirus's spread.
The agency's new focus, she wrote in an agency-wide email, would be on becoming “more nimble and responsive to needs that arise in health emergencies,” Statnews.com reported, while making it a priority to gather data “that can be used to rapidly dispense public health guidance, rather than craft scientific papers.”
Yet it is the issuance of exactly that kind of public health guidance, agency critics say, that led to confusion during the COVID pandemic, potentially making the situation worse by creating a false sense of security that left people feeling they were protecting themselves by utilizing measures that were ineffective in stopping the spread or preventing exposure to the virus. One of those, the social distancing guideline setting out the need for people to remain at least six feet apart from one another is now known to have been issued based on no scientific testing whatsoever. It was, people now feel comfortable acknowledging, a made-up number that did not come from, as it was popular to say at the time, “following the science.”
In her email, Walensky told the agency's 11,000 employees, “For 75 years, CDC and public health have been preparing for Covid-19, and in our big moment, our performance did not reliably meet expectations.” Her new goal, she wrote, is to create “a new, public health action-oriented culture at CDC that emphasizes accountability, collaboration, communication, and timeliness.”
She has a long way to go. Jason Schwartz, a health policy researcher at the Yale School of Public Health told CBS News “We saw during COVID that CDC's structures, frankly, weren't designed to take in information, digest it and disseminate it to the public at the speed necessary.”
What the agency did do was assist in the politicization of the disease, confuse the public, and fight all efforts to be held accountable for its mistakes on Capitol Hill. Writing in the Washington Examiner, Zachary Faria – who acknowledged Walensky was not at the CDC when the pandemic began – nonetheless added to the confusion by misstating the president's intentions regarding vaccine mandates.
“She confused the public repeatedly, saying that President Joe Biden was considering a vaccination mandate before backtracking to say that there ‘Will be no federal mandate.' Not even two months later, Biden did indeed put a vaccine mandate in place,” Faria wrote.
The CDC director also helped inflame the public's anxiety by appearing at congressional hearings wearing two masks despite having received several doses of the vaccine. Such displays of caution on her part conflicted with the messages public health experts were sending to the American people who, seeing things with their own eyes, saw that even they were not sure what they were telling everyone was correct.
“Worst of all was how Walensky and the CDC justified restrictions on children, who have never been at serious risk from COVID,” Faria wrote, explaining her repeated change in position about social distancing in schools and the need to vaccinate teachers and students helped keep schools closed for an unacceptable period.
“If your culture is not aligned entirely with what your mission is, it doesn't matter how good the strategy is. It doesn't matter what your org charts are. It is all about the workforce culture,” Jay Varma, who spent 20 years at CDC before becoming director of the Cornell Center for Pandemic Prevention and Response at Weill Cornell Medicine told Statnews.com.
“It's an agency run by geeks. It's run by doctors and Ph.D.'s,” Varma said. “What are doctors and scientists notoriously bad at? Managing. They're really good at hypothesis-driven research and analyzing information and making predictions about what might happen. What they're really bad at is managing people in an effective way.”
Walensky will need time to make the changes – but it is time the country may now have. The CDC has been slow to respond to the emergence of Monkeypox, an infectious viral disease occurring in humans and other animals marked by fever, swollen lymph nodes and a rash that forms blisters that eventually crust over. The fact that is spreading disproportionately “among men who have sex with men and their sexual networks,” as CNN recently put it, has heightened concerns that political sensitivities are being allowed to interfere with the steps needed to prevent it from spreading into the at-large population.
“Not wanting to reproduce the kind of anti-gay stigma seen during the early AIDS crisis, some argue that articulating which group is at highest risk for monkeypox infection might be dangerous,” CNN said, probably unaware that this was an almost exact description of how the CDC and other public health agencies failed in their reaction to COVID even before it reached the pandemic level.
Against the advice of many who suggested the primary objective should be the isolation of those at high risk for fatal outcomes following exposure to COVID, the CDC and others attempted to isolate and immunize the nation. This led to economic and social lockdowns from which it will take years, perhaps decades before America can recover. It can be said the CDC's bad advice, politicization and lack of readiness cost the nation hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars.
For nearly two years the CDC and other public health agencies and administrators made pronouncements that infected the American way of life at every level, often without debate or examination. Efforts to call their dictates into question were ridiculed, even suppressed, at great cost to the nation. It's helpful that Walensky wants to reform her agency, but the best reforms come only after we know what happened to cause the problems.
Somehow, Walensky and other public health policymakers want to skip over that critical phase. No one wants to acknowledge their mistakes in public, especially if people died because of them. Nonetheless, they should not be allowed to hide behind the banner of reform now without being held accountable. America deserves an explanation, post-COVID, of how things were allowed to get as bad as they did. Not just an explanation of where the disease came from and whether it was produced in some far-off biological research facility and somehow got away but why the response to the infection was met with so much inconsistent advice coming from the government agencies employing the well-paid, well-funded experts who were supposed to know it all.
They didn't, and we deserve to know why.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
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The only suitable overhaul is to fire all of the bureaucrats who are now trying to cover their tracks.
This is the sort of egregious misfeasance and malfeasance over an extended period of time that must NOT be rewarded with a gentle reprimand and a transfer to somewhere else with comparable or higher pay. To many lives, businesses and an entire economy were destroyed by this individual, Dr. Fauci and complicit politicians. Weak and largely insincere statements to do better are insufficient. Both the CDC and the NIH need to be completely redone from the bottom up and with competent oversight of the rebuilding
Fauci, Walensky and others are knowingly complicit in the loss of billions of dollars by people who lost their jobs, businesses that closed. Then there are the millions of children who lost a year or more of their education because of the actions of the CDC, politicians and the media. Of course there are the deaths of a million people in this country who could possibly have been helped by appropriate treatment that was denied in favor of the chemical cocktail they call the Mrna vaccine.
Those responsible for this immense loss to our country should not just be allowed to say, “We might have made a few mistakes.” and then walk away from it.
My first recollection of the CDC and covid was from a woman spouting some political rant, only to find out she was the sister of a let’s get Trump legal attack. The CDC, like the FBI, should Never be political. Politics made the mistake, harming many of We the People, it wasn’t medical caretakers, which is what the CDC is supposed to be. Stop being political, it is destructive, and it makes us lose respect and trust. It’s as simple as that.
This was intentional – this is not an apology, this is a CYA for her and the agency and shame on all who were involved in this cluster-buster lie from hell.
Had CDC done their JOB – they never would have isolated people, never demanded they get taxed, never endorsed a mandate for doing it, working with the CD to eliminate and remove KNOWN effective medicines that worked and instead allowed people to suffer alone and die.
God knows them, their intentions and what they did to destroy the citizenry, the country and business in general and that is UNFORGIVABLE and to us was absolutely irresponsible.
The CDC should fire that pathetic lying Gain of Function, and BioWeapon Maker FauxciStein and he should be open to lawsuits from those who lost someone due to his negligence
I don’t think for one minute, that they were mistakes!! They were intentionally laid out to inflict fear and to see if the demented Democrats could control the people — and to implement mail-in ballots!! And sure enough, it worked!!
Agree 100%!
She should be fired
Overhaul from ground up, change policies
More flexible
Give tours of Hq to Public
Educate more
Margaret
Great ideas, Stephen.
What it amounts to is the CDC has been politicized by the left. They issue the marching orders and they obey.
She as the head of CDC basically admits that she totally failed in her job.
Any competent leader would demand that she resign or be fired. This will not happen though, in this administration. She will be rewarded by sailing the political winds and appeasing the politicians instead of serving the people. Many have died because of her lack of backbone and incompetence.
An excellent analysis which basically demonstrates The Peter Principle in operation: for example, you take a good physician and promote him / her to become a poor administrator. It happens all the time. I’ve never worked there, but I’m sure that ‘corporate inbreeding’ from the good-old-boy principle is rampant.
The first step in the ‘overhaul’ should be to fire the top 2 or 3 levels of management there, starting with Ms. Walensky.
go ahead and rearrange those deck chairs. . .makes no difference–the ship is still sinking. . .
I believe this was done on purpose to control the population. It’s part of the left’s socialist agenda. I don’t think it was from negligence. They mishandled the pandemic all right but I totally believe it was intentional to cause fear and anxiety and, as someone else pointed out, to implement mail-in ballots for the 2000 election.
A few of things I noticed – one, it’s not “Ph.D.’s”. The term is a plural, no apostrophe needed, as it’s not possessive or a contraction. Let’s get our punctuation correct. And we wonder why no one believes the media anymore – most amateurs don’t know how to craft a sentence properly, & most media is populated with abject amateurs.
Two, monkeypox is not “disproportionately” spread among the sodomite community – that’s exactly the community it targets. That is, men who have relations with men – nothing disproportionate about it – similar to AIDS.
Ant finally, this: “They’re really good at hypothesis-driven research and analyzing information and making predictions about what might happen.”
No, “scientists” are not even well-versed in research either, as the reaction to the Chinese flu & the resultant poison pharmaceutical concoctions proved, beyond any shadow of a doubt.
When “science” calls a poison concoction a “vaccine”, when it doesn’t do what an actual vaccine is supposed to accomplish – that is, prevent infection & spread – but instead causes hundreds of thousands of adverse reactions, including tens of thousands of deaths, then “science” isn’t science, it’s a politically motivated bald-faced lie masquerading as science. You know, similar to saying that a male can magically become a female because one wishes it to be so (& vice-versa). The medical profession has proven itself to be staffed by un-scientific lunatics with an agenda to destroy the human population. We need to stop this lunacy.