• Home
  • Politics
  • Health
  • World
  • Business
  • Finance
  • Tech
  • More
    • Sports
    • Entertainment
    • Lifestyle
What's Hot

Trump Announces First Post-Tariff Trade Deal

May 8, 2025

100 Funny Father’s Day Quotes for Hilariously Relatable Humor (and Plenty of Love Too)

May 8, 2025

Top 10 Benefits Of Acupuncture

May 8, 2025
Facebook Twitter Instagram
  • Contact
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms & Conditions
Friday, May 9
Patriot Now NewsPatriot Now News
  • Home
  • Politics

    Security video shows brazen sexual assault of California woman by homeless man

    October 24, 2023

    Woman makes disturbing discovery after her boyfriend chases away home intruder who stabbed him

    October 24, 2023

    Poll finds Americans overwhelmingly support Israel’s war on Hamas, but younger Americans defend Hamas

    October 24, 2023

    Off-duty pilot charged with 83 counts of attempted murder after allegedly trying to shut off engines midflight on Alaska Airlines

    October 23, 2023

    Leaked audio of Shelia Jackson Lee abusively cursing staffer

    October 22, 2023
  • Health

    Disparities In Cataract Care Are A Sorry Sight

    October 16, 2023

    Vaccine Stocks—Including Pfizer, Moderna, BioNTech And Novavax—Slide Amid Plummeting Demand

    October 16, 2023

    Long-term steroid use should be a last resort

    October 16, 2023

    Rite Aid Files For Bankruptcy With More ‘Underperforming Stores’ To Close

    October 16, 2023

    Who’s Still Dying From Complications Related To Covid-19?

    October 16, 2023
  • World

    New York Democrat Dan Goldman Accuses ‘Conservatives in the South’ of Holding Rallies with ‘Swastikas’

    October 13, 2023

    IDF Ret. Major General Describes Rushing to Save Son, Granddaughter During Hamas Invasion

    October 13, 2023

    Black Lives Matter Group Deletes Tweet Showing Support for Hamas 

    October 13, 2023

    AOC Denounces NYC Rally Cheering Hamas Terrorism: ‘Unacceptable’

    October 13, 2023

    L.A. Prosecutors Call Out Soros-Backed Gascón for Silence on Israel

    October 13, 2023
  • Business

    Trump Announces First Post-Tariff Trade Deal

    May 8, 2025

    Electric Vehicle Sales Nosedive As GOP Takes Buzzsaw To Biden’s Mandate

    May 7, 2025

    Tyson Foods Announces It Will Bend The Knee To Trump Admin’s New Rules

    May 7, 2025

    Federal Reserve Holds Interest Rates Steady Despite Pressure From Trump

    May 7, 2025

    ‘Wait Them Out’: John Kennedy Tells Larry Kudlow One Lie He Suspects China’s Telling US

    May 7, 2025
  • Finance

    Ending China’s De Minimis Exception Brings 3 Benefits for Americans

    April 17, 2025

    The Trump Tariff Shock Should Push Indonesia to Reform Its Economy

    April 17, 2025

    Tariff Talks an Opportunity to Reinvigorate the Japan-US Alliance

    April 17, 2025

    How China’s Companies Are Responding to the US Trade War

    April 16, 2025

    The US Flip-flop Over H20 Chip Restrictions 

    April 16, 2025
  • Tech

    Cruz Confronts Zuckerberg on Pointless Warning for Child Porn Searches

    February 2, 2024

    FTX Abandons Plans to Relaunch Crypto Exchange, Commits to Full Repayment of Customers and Creditors

    February 2, 2024

    Elon Musk Proposes Tesla Reincorporates in Texas After Delaware Judge Voids Pay Package

    February 2, 2024

    Tesla’s Elon Musk Tops Disney’s Bob Iger as Most Overrated Chief Executive

    February 2, 2024

    Mark Zuckerberg’s Wealth Grew $84 Billion in 2023 as Pedophiles Target Children on Facebook, Instagram

    February 2, 2024
  • More
    • Sports
    • Entertainment
    • Lifestyle
Patriot Now NewsPatriot Now News
Home»Health»Walensky prepares to leave CDC — and Congress — behind
Health

Walensky prepares to leave CDC — and Congress — behind

July 1, 2023No Comments8 Mins Read
Facebook Twitter Pinterest LinkedIn Tumblr Email
Walensky prepares to leave CDC — and Congress — behind
Share
Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Email

Rochelle Walensky, the outgoing director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, will miss aspects of leading the nation’s top public health agency when her term ends Friday. But testifying before Congress is not likely to be among them.

Walensky squared off against congressional committees 17 times during her 2½ years as head of the CDC, most recently in mid-June, when she faced a grilling from Republicans on the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability.

Asked in an interview with STAT this week if she would miss such opportunities, Walensky said, with evident glee: “I am so going to miss that part.”

If testifying before Congress was a new experience for Walensky, so was much of her job. Although she has a masters in public health, Walensky’s background when she took the CDC job was clinical medicine. An HIV specialist, she stepped down as chief of the division of infectious diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital to go to the agency.

She acknowledged the learning curve was steep. But in her final days in the office, she appeared more interested in describing what the agency has done and where it is heading than in dwelling on her feelings about having led it through a bruising 29 months.

The communications training she received seems to have delivered results; she has clearly learned the crucial — if sometimes frustrating for journalists — technique of using a question to pivot to something she wants to talk about. Case in point: Yes, the appearances before congressional committees were tough, but they gave her a chance to brag about the work of the CDC.

“We at CDC have never in our 76-year history had to tackle a pandemic of the size, scale, and scope that Covid delivered to us. These are some of the things that we learned along the way, and what we’re doing to improve [on them]. And these are some of the things that were really extraordinary that we did that nobody heard about,” Walensky said.

In a wide-ranging interview, Walensky spoke of the progress being made to reform the agency, part of the CDC Moving Forward renewal that she launched last year.

There is the new registry of CDC staff that lists the various skills each has, a tool designed to make the agency more ready to respond. When the CDC needed to deploy Spanish-speaking lab technicians to a Marburg virus outbreak in Equatorial Guinea this spring, for example, the candidate pool was evident.

See also  Americans walk less frequently and less safely compared to other countries, shows research

There is the push to get CDC science out faster to help shape policy and guidance for the public. Walensky said that the internal clearance time for scientific articles has been halved, noting proudly that the impact factor of the CDC online journal Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report has increased substantially. (A journal’s impact factor signals how important it is to its field and how often its articles are cited elsewhere.)

“We have more work to do there, but we are getting our science out faster,” she said.

And there’s a substantial overhaul underway of the CDC’s massive website, which involves a review of 200,000 web pages that sometimes contradict each other. The process involves streamlining the content, but also archiving material that will still be available to the public, Walensky said.

She is clearly pleased with the progress her reform efforts have produced, but cognizant, too, of the fact that this is a job she won’t — she couldn’t — see through to completion. “I will humbly say that this will take years to do,” she said.

Walensky doesn’t appear worried that her departure will compromise the progress.

“So much of what I really wanted to do is set the visions, set the framework, set the inflection point, and put the pedal to the metal,” she said. “What I will say is, there’s been an extraordinary amount of buy-in, not only within the agency, but outside the agency. At the administration level, at the [Department of Health and Human Services] level…. I think that there is momentum and a recognition that this work needs to be done.”

But some of what the agency needs to effect change is beyond its own powers to implement. Critically, it lacks the authority to require states, territories, and tribes to share data. When it needs ongoing access to data — in the case of last summer’s mpox outbreak, for example — it must negotiate scores of data-use agreements with states, territories, tribes, and local health authorities. Some allow CDC to share their data broadly, others place restrictions on what can be disclosed. When all those agreements were signed in September, CDC could see that the outbreak had peaked at the beginning of August.

See also  How To Identify A Reliable Vendor To Buy THC-O Cart?

“Our job is to be on top of these things before they turn into outbreaks or emergencies,” Walensky said.

Changing that will require congressional action. Walensky believes there is bipartisan understanding of this need among the lawmakers in Congress who understand health. But translating that into new authorities may not be feasible in the current climate.

“Maybe there’s not a bipartisan pathway to get there right now. But there’s an understanding that we can’t be nimble if we can’t see what’s happening,” she said. “Congress will need to step forward.”

The CDC also badly needs workforce flexibility. The agency does not have the authority to hire in emergencies the way an agency like FEMA — the Federal Emergency Management Agency — does.

“It is true that if tomorrow we were to get the budgetary workforce and data authorities that we would need to be a nimble agency, we would not yet be where we need to be within the agency,” Walensky said. “That work is the work that we are doing.

“It is also the case that if we are the only ones doing that work, and we don’t get those authorities, we will still not be able to be the nimble agency that’s expected from us.”

Asked to reflect on what she wished she had known going into the job, Walensky said she and other players perhaps underestimated the degree to which deliberate disinformation would erode efforts to keep the public safe during the pandemic.

“I think all of us probably didn’t appreciate how many nefarious actors would be out there trying to undermine the fact that science does evolve and science does change, and the virus does evolve, and the virus does change,” she said. “We could have been louder in saying that. And that there were people acting intentionally to undermine us has been a challenge.”

Another thing Walensky learned is that during a health crisis, there are lots of people at the table making response decisions. Some approach the decision-making through the prism of what’s best for health; for others the primary concern may be continuity of education, the stability of the nation’s transport system, or the state of the economy. The fact that there is this pull and push of competing priorities is not well understood, she suggested.

See also  Suicide Rate Reaches All-Time High In 2022, CDC Data Suggests

A case in point: The CDC was hammered for relaxing isolation and quarantine guidance at the start of the Omicron wave. The evolved virus was much more infectious than what came before, in part because it was able to evade some of the defenses people’s immune systems had been generating. Soon after its appearance, huge numbers of people were either sick, or quarantining themselves, because they had been exposed to someone who was infected. There was a real risk that key societal functions would grind to a halt. Grocery store shelves would empty and hospitals would lack the staff to deliver care.

“We heard from hospitals that blood culture bottles weren’t delivered, we heard from dialysis centers that they couldn’t get dialysate” — a solution used to clean impurities from blood — “we heard from pharmacies that their pharmacists couldn’t come in, and their patients couldn’t pick up their insulin,” Walensky said.

Halving the amount of time exposed people needed to be in quarantine was a compromise needed to keep the country functioning. She called it “doing the least amount of harm.”

It didn’t seem that way to the agency’s vocal critics. “Thanksgiving-Christmas of 2021 was not my favorite of times,” Walensky admitted.

As she leaves the CDC, Walensky finds herself in an unusual spot. When she took the CDC job, she resigned from Mass General. She has nothing on the professional horizon. “My next chapter is very intentionally blank.”

“I have never been in this situation, and I don’t know how long it will last,” Walensky said, noting she looks forward to spending time with her husband, sons, and parents this summer. She plans to do some reading and going to the gym. She also plans to devote time to pondering what her next act should be. One thing she feels confident of: It will be in the health/public health sphere.

“I deeply believe in the mission,” Walensky said. “And part of the real question in my mind, and that I really want to spend some time thinking through and being intentional about, is where is the most productive perch from which I can do that?”

CDC Congress leave Prepares Walensky
Share. Facebook Twitter Pinterest LinkedIn Tumblr Email

Related Posts

Biden Shelled Out $80,000,000,000 For IRS Enforcement. Congress Has Already Revoked Half Of It.

December 27, 2024

‘It Was A Car Wreck’: Fox Business Guest Says Congress, Americans ‘Got Hooked’ On Gov’t Spending Binge

December 26, 2024

Server Claims Brittany Mahomes Did Not Leave Tip on $130 Bill

January 8, 2024

‘Net-Negative’: DC Beltway Sports Stadium Battle Could Leave Taxpayers With A Massive Bill

December 17, 2023
Add A Comment

Leave A Reply Cancel Reply

Top Posts

Biden Admin Considers Dropping Sanctions On Mining Magnate Accused Of Corruption In Push For Electric Vehicles: REPORT

October 11, 2023

Deion Sanders Breaks Off Engagement with Tracey Edmonds After 4 Years

December 5, 2023

Markets Are Wrong on US Rate-Cut Bets, BlackRock Says

March 28, 2023

Chad Johnson Says Cowboys Owner Jerry Jones is the ‘Motherf*ck*ng Problem!’

January 16, 2024
Don't Miss

Trump Announces First Post-Tariff Trade Deal

Business May 8, 2025

President Donald Trump announced Thursday the U.S. has reached a trade agreement with the U.K.,…

100 Funny Father’s Day Quotes for Hilariously Relatable Humor (and Plenty of Love Too)

May 8, 2025

Top 10 Benefits Of Acupuncture

May 8, 2025

Electric Vehicle Sales Nosedive As GOP Takes Buzzsaw To Biden’s Mandate

May 7, 2025
About
About

This is your World, Tech, Health, Entertainment and Sports website. We provide the latest breaking news straight from the News industry.

We're social. Connect with us:

Facebook Twitter Instagram Pinterest
Categories
  • Business (4,110)
  • Entertainment (4,220)
  • Finance (3,202)
  • Health (1,938)
  • Lifestyle (1,626)
  • Politics (3,084)
  • Sports (4,036)
  • Tech (2,006)
  • Uncategorized (4)
  • World (3,944)
Our Picks

Eli Lilly Announces Plan To Invest $27 Billion In America Amid Trump Tariff Threats

February 26, 2025

Biden Now Admits There’s a Migrant Crisis and Dems Are Mad He’s Trying to Secure Border

October 7, 2023

Serbian President Denies Military Buildup on Border with Kosovo

October 4, 2023
Popular Posts

Trump Announces First Post-Tariff Trade Deal

May 8, 2025

100 Funny Father’s Day Quotes for Hilariously Relatable Humor (and Plenty of Love Too)

May 8, 2025

Top 10 Benefits Of Acupuncture

May 8, 2025
© 2025 Patriotnownews.com - All rights reserved.
  • Contact
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms & Conditions

Type above and press Enter to search. Press Esc to cancel.