The director of the country's leading health authority candidly admitted to some of the agency's missteps in handling the COVID pandemic.
On Thursday, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky gave a speech at her alma mater, the Washington University Medical School in St. Louis, Missouri, where she candidly amitted that the agency failed in some aspects of its COVID responde. The remarked about how the agency's messaging and handling of data throughout the COVID pandemic had affirmed the concerns of many health scientists who had been censored or labeled as "misinformation" spreaders.
According to WND, Walensky admitted that the CDC exercised "too little caution and too much optimism" about the effectiveness of COVID vaccines in preventing the transmission of the coronavirus and its resulting infection and death of patients. During Thursday's event in Missouri, Walensky was interviewed by Dr. William G. Powderly, who serves as the co-director of Washington University's Division of Infectious Diseases.
When asked what she believed the CDC got right, Walensky said that the delivery of 550 million COVID vaccines was something she commended the agency for, saying that she was "proud of our ability to get data out." The CDC chief added that the agency needed to provide "vaccine effectiveness data as fast as we can have it because everybody wants to know how long this vaccine is working and is it waning."
Walensky claims that over the past year, data on COVID vaccine effectiveness was published, on average, every 48 hours, describing the feat as "extraordinary." She added that a new "pedal to the metal" kind of system of data assimilation and analysis enabled the CDC to link "vaccine immunization data to testing data...to death data."
"Because of that we can now, within four weeks, look at vaccine effectiveness for cases and deaths for two-thirds of America," Walensky explained. "We can stratify by age, we can stratify by date of vaccine, we can stratify by which vaccine you got."
But when asked about areas of improvement, Walensky said that the CDC had practiced "too little caution and too much optimism for some good things that came our way." She emphasized that "nobody" said that the COVID vaccines would "wear off."
Walensky also clarified how the CDC continues to "lead with science" but that they may have failed to communicate that "science is black and white" but also, "science is gray." She explained that science is "not always immediate" and that it may take months or even years to find the answer.
Walensky recently shared insights on how the agency is handling public health moving forward from the COVID pandemic, CBS News reported. The CDC chief admitted that there is "a lot of public health catch-up work to do." She admitted that a lot of work lies ahead for her and her agency but that they continue to bolster public health infrastructure, data systems, and their workforce.
She was concerned that many Americans have failed to go on routine health screenings during the pandemic and that the COVID pandemic had affected children due to the restrictions and lockdowns. Walensky added that fewer people had received other vaccines, such as the annual flu shot, an occurrence she links to vaccine hesitancy.
