The Fall of The CDC As Walensky Goes Down With The Ship
In the current administration, it appears that no amount of public face plants will get health officials quietly shuffled out of their positions. During the pandemic response, flawed as it was, the American people watched as a master manipulator with decades of experienced double talk, gaslighting families and bold faced lies to the public. Tony Fauci was a rare breed of operator with a pedigree to conceal inconvenient truths in realtime – and he did with masks, vaccines efficacy, safety and lockdowns
Then we have CDC director Rochelle Walensky. She is in many ways the antithesis of Fauci and his ilk. Although much of the public knows that a manipulative response is coming after she’s asked a question, her answers leave people within earshot frustrated and hopeless. Not because she’s an inept public health leader but because her effort to conceal truths has front facing childlike unpreparedness.
At one time in her career, Walensky may have been a sharp, hard-hitting professor at Harvard and hospital chief propelling her into the director position at the top public health agency in the US. Yet, akin to a Benjamin Button of health communication and public relations, Walensky seems to regress in tact, professionalism and trust as her tenure as CDC director goes forward in time. With Charles Manson-like eye contact, Walensky often says things she probably shouldn’t say out loud – or at the very least, seems not to know any better.
American’s watched in dismay as Walensky (along with Fauci, Hotez, and others) did their best to soft message the waning effectiveness of the mRNA Covid shots. From 95% effective, according to Pfizer’s press release, to can’t stop, won’t stop transmission or infection. During the entire time, we knew before the first shots went in American arms that Pfizer never tested if they’s stop transmission or death – never mind the safety issues.
Walensky’s initial ‘charm,’ flanked by Fauci’s unwavering belief in himself, was enough to convince millions of Americans, along with key conservative media pundits who didn’t do their research, to champion Pfizer’s biggest, boldest medical bluff in the history of their criminal-fine- paying company’s history.
It was in 2021 that Walensky really fell off the PR wagon. During a long form conversation at the University of Washington, she blamed ‘too much optimism’ for the reason ‘nobody’ thought the efficacy would wane or thought it wouldn’t be potent against other variant.
By the time Walensky did the U of W interview, the CDC’s trust and integrity in the eyes of the public was in free fall. The announcement of an internal review and restructuring did little for its image or shortcomings still unfixed and devastating for public health.
The CDC’s lack of trust and integrity reached critical, point of no return territory during a recent Joint Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee and Health Subcommittee Hearing. While ironically asking for more power at the CDC, Walensky haphazardly answered questions doing more harm than good to public health discourse.
While many watched in awe as ACIP gave a unanimous recommendation to allow Covid shots to be rolled out across pediatric ages despite the lack of data along with serious safety concerns, Walensky gave a stunningly tone-deaf reason when asked about the agency’s rationale:
In true blame-the-victim fashion, Walensky said ‘misinformation’ was the reason why people are losing faith now in the childhood vaccine schedule.
A childhood vaccine schedule whose overall safety testing for harms is arguably less than what the world just witnessed with the rushed mRNA Covid shots.
In the running for the worst single soundbite in recent CDC history was Walensky’s answer when Congressman Gary Palmer when he said he was surprised that NIH and CDC didn’t do any follow-up testing to determine the overall effectiveness of masking along with the harms masks were having on kids during the pandemic.
Walensky claimed that there were “so many studies that demonstrated time and time again, in the height of Covid transmission, that masks were working to prevent transmission” that she wasn’t sure anyone would have even proposed such a trial.
However, the recently published Cochrane Collaboration meta-analysis of mask studies looking at 78 studies that made the cut, came to these conclusions:
“Wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference to the outcome of influenza-like illness (ILI)/COVID-19 like illness compared to not wearing masks…”
“Wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference to the outcome of laboratory-confirmed influenza/SARS-CoV-2 compared to not wearing masks…”
In some respects Walensky was partially accurate when saying no one would propose a trial to look at harms, learning loss or developmental delays in children, not because masks were such a great success, but because perhaps no one wanted to know the answer.
Perhaps the most important metric the public being forced to take a health intervention needs to know is will it cause more harm than good?
“Harms were rarely measured and poorly reported” found the Cochrane Collaboration.
As health officials use the excuse that Covid was a crazy time and they had to do something, instead of just wait around for ‘The Science.’
Cochrane epidemiologist Tom Jefferson, who was an author on the mask reanalysis study, said
“…it’s a complete subversion of the ‘precautionary principle’ which states that you should do nothing unless you have reasonable evidence that benefits outweigh the harms.”
What lies ahead for the CDC is uncertain. What is known is that its self-inflicted loss of trust and integrity at nearly every step can no longer be blamed on some nebulous word like ‘misinformation’ from the aether that the flailing agency needs more money to fight.
I eagerly await the full dismantling of the CDC
You’re likely one of the best research journalists today, Jeffrey. I wish your segment from The Highwire each week was made available for further dissemination.