Is CDC Director Rochelle Walensky Just Unable to Communicate Clearly?

Let’s begin by acknowledging that being director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is a tough job, even tougher during a global pandemic, and even tougher when your assessments may run contrary to the interests of the president and the executive branch.

And so maybe Dr. Rochelle Walensky had a good reason to say, five days into the Biden administration, that she didn’t know how many doses of the coronavirus vaccine the country had. And maybe her switching on recommending three feet, then six feet, then three feet again for social distancing in schools was an unavoidable concession to the pressures around reopening schools.

But Walensky has had a really lousy week when it comes to public communication, which is a pretty important aspect of her job.

On March 29, she came out with a rather eye-opening dire warning. “I’m going to pause here, I’m going to lose the script, and I’m going to reflect on the recurring feeling I have of impending doom. We have so much to look forward to, so much promise and potential of where we are and so much reason for hope, but right now I’m scared.” And cases are indeed up a bit, with particularly bad spikes in Michigan and some of the northeastern states. Nationally, the daily new case number has risen from the 50,000 range to the 60,000 range. But an increasingly vaccinated America is one where thankfully fewer Americans will succumb to the virus. The seven-day moving average of new deaths is down to 525, the lowest it has been since October. The latest measurement of average ICU capacity at 4,816 hospitals across the country is 70 percent.

We’re averaging more than 3 million vaccinations per day, more than 100 million Americans have gotten at least one dose, and we’ve protected large percentages of the most vulnerable. The situation is dramatically improving, week by week, month by month. Why is the CDC Director going on television and warning of “impending doom”?

Then there’s Walensky’s March 30 declaration that “our data from the C.D.C. today suggests that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t get sick… And that it’s not just in the clinical trials, it’s also in real-world data.” And the next day, the CDC effectively said, “wait, nevermind,” and insisted the data wasn’t clear. If the CDC is going to have to completely contradict a sweeping and clear statement from its own director… did it have to do it right before April Fool’s Day?

Walensky was wrong to say vaccinated people couldn’t carry the virus at all, bt she was right to emphasize that the risk of vaccinated people spreading the virus is pretty low. As I have been citing for a while now, “when the vaccines were studied in macaque monkeys (during preclinical testing), they did eliminate asymptomatic infection — researchers swabbed the vaccinated macaques’ noses and found little or no virus.” A vaccine that greatly reduces the amount of virus in your nasal passages is one that is going to cut the rate of transmission dramatically – maybe not completely, but dramatically.

Then, on Good Friday, the CDC issued official guidance, declaring that travel is okay for the vaccinated. Great! Although it’s not as if the vaccine or the protection it offers changed since February 16, when the CDC guidance recommended, “delay travel and stay home to protect yourself and others from COVID-19, even if you are vaccinated.” That never made that much sense, as once you’re protected, you’re protected.

And it seems fair to wonder how much good it did to issue guidance on travel for vaccinated Americans right before Easter, as a lot of people had already made their travel decisions.

Today, Walensky announced that the “People can be infected with the virus that causes COVID-19 through contact with contaminated surfaces and objects. However, evidence has demonstrated that the risk by this route of transmission is actually low.”

That’s great. Do we have to wait 24 hours to see if the rest of her agency concurs with her assessment?