Good Riddance to Rochelle Walensky

A fter a little more than two years at the helm of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Rochelle Walensky announced last week that she will be stepping down as the agency’s director. Her departure is being processed as though it is another feature of the virus that dominated her tenure at the CDC. With the World Health Organization downgrading the threat posed by Covid-19, and the Biden administration allowing the public-health emergency declared in response to the pandemic to expire, Walensky’s tenure has also passively expired. Her work here is done.

But Walensky’s record will not pass from memory without criticism. For example, a gentle elegy in the Wall Street Journal cites “some public health experts” who chided Walensky’s CDC for its “messy and confusing” messages about the agency’s preferred pandemic-mitigation methods. The New York Times was even more generous, noting that Walensky inherited the “near-impossible task” of restoring the CDC’s reputation, which had been tarnished after Trump-administration officials “hectored” officials and “meddled” in their work.

Only if these outlets’ reporters had taken a monastic vow of poverty could they have been more charitable to the outgoing CDC director. Beyond the occasional mixed message, Walensky’s tenure was typified by her craven deference to political imperatives, her reliance on dubious studies and emotional reasoning to manipulate public opinion, and her willingness to occasionally abuse her authority to promote a narrow reading of what constitutes the public good.

Walensky’s tenure began inauspiciously enough when she assumed her appointment with the foolish understanding that she was expected to follow the clinical data in the effort to craft a sensible pandemic response. The Biden White House quickly disabused her of that notion.

The Biden administration was just two weeks old when reporters received an update from its leading health officials in which Walensky offered the hopeful observation that there was “increasing data to suggest that schools can safely re-open and that safe reopening does not suggest that teachers need to be vaccinated.” She was soon subjected to a chiding from White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, who dismissed data that conflicted with the administration’s coddling of America’s teachers’ unions. Walensky’s remark, Psaki insisted, didn’t reflect her boss’s view, and the CDC director had been speaking only “in her personal capacity.”

The message was received. Within days, Walensky’s claim about the data — data that indicated that the conditions to safely reopen every American school existed at the time of her remarks — evolved. “I think we need a lot more resources in order to get the schools safe,” she suddenly averred. With that, expert opinion comported with the party line, which maintained that even $50 billion in unused aid to schools was not enough.

Before the end of the administration’s first 100 days, Walensky began reliably singing from the president’s preferred hymnal. “I’m going to lose the script and I’m going to reflect on the recurring feeling I have of impending doom,” she confessed as infection and hospitalization rates rose again in March 2021. “Right now, I’m scared.” This admission corresponded to the despondency she reported experiencing amid an increase in the number of states rolling back pandemic-era restrictions.

If those concerns were sincere, Walensky might have spent the next year evincing the courage of her convictions. Instead, she spent it flitting manically between paralyzing dread and relative assurance that the pandemic’s risks were manageable — between confidence in the public’s capacity for prudence and alarm over its pliant docility.

In January 2022, Walensky observed that the “overwhelming number of deaths, over 75 [percent], occurred in people who had at least four comorbidities.” This, she insisted, represented “encouraging news in the context of Omicron.” That should have been comforting. But by that May, she began lobbying for the restoration of pre-vaccination conventions such as indoor-masking mandates. Indeed, Walensky had spent the preceding months arguing for the adoption of widespread masking culture not to combat Covid-19 but as basic good hygiene. “Masks also help protect from other illnesses like common cold and flu,” she insisted in December 2021, as well as “reduce your chance of Covid-19 infection by more than 80 percent.”

The studies that allegedly justified these policy recommendations were routinely overinterpreted or just shoddy. But even if the data were sound, the agency’s scattershot guidance undermined the public’s trust in America’s central health authority. It diluted the notion that the unique contingencies associated with the pandemic were justified, and it provided the public with permission to ignore the agency’s guidance (which, when it comes to masking, the public was eager to do).

It wasn’t until August 2022 that the CDC updated its Covid guidance to “no longer differentiate based on a person’s vaccination status,” which was predicated on the discovery that the vaccinated can catch and transmit the disease despite having “some degree of protection against severe illness.” But if the CDC disagreed with the rationale for vaccination mandates applied to federal employees or workers in health-care facilities, neither Walensky nor anyone else at the agency said so.

Nor did her agency decline the chance to wield power that the Supreme Court later determined it had seized when it used the pandemic as an excuse to abrogate the rights of American property-owners. The CDC defended its authority to impose a nationwide moratorium on tenant evictions for failure to make rent or mortgage payments because that policy helps “facilitate self-isolation and self-quarantine by people who become ill” and “allows additional time for rent relief to reach renters and to further increase vaccination rates.” Walensky added that the Court’s interference would force people into “crowded or congregate settings — like homeless shelters.” Whatever the merits of these claims, they are not arguments in favor of the lawless usurpation of congressional power.

Walensky bequeaths her successor with a plan to reform her agency predicated on the admission that it got some key aspects of its response to the pandemic wrong. In revealing the proposal, she confessed that “in our big moment, our performance did not reliably meet expectations.” But as former deputy secretary of Health and Human Services Tevi Troy observed in his review of the plan, it would only constitute a cosmetic revision to what is likely to be a persistently intolerable status quo.

Walensky’s proposal would do little to address the conditions that led the agency to undervalue validated research, which in turn kept American schools closed for longer than those in much of the rest of the industrialized world. It would do little to diminish the undue influence of teachers’ unions over the CDC’s clinical guidance. It fails to impose or even envision checks on the agency to prevent future unconstitutional power grabs. It doesn’t dwell on the CDC’s willingness to lend its scant credibility to the president’s preferred political initiatives.

Walensky was described as a “political outsider” when she assumed her role. That made her easy to undercut and sideline, which is exactly what the White House did — at least at first, before Walensky learned how to play the game. Once she did, she proved more than willing to sacrifice trust in her agency and the administration she served for a seat at the table.