After 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.
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