“Hard things are hard” reads a plaque that Rochelle Walensky will take with her Friday when she steps away from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director’s desk for the last time.
(Bloomberg) — “Hard things are hard” reads a plaque that Rochelle Walensky will take with her Friday when she steps away from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director’s desk for the last time.
It’s an understatement for what the former Harvard infectious disease specialist faced after President Joe Biden named her agency chief in the thick of a pandemic that’s killed more than 1.1 million Americans. While advising on controversial measures like school closings and masking, she oversaw the US rollout of some 700 million shots credited with saving millions of lives worldwide — work that made her a target for vaccine skeptics and Republicans.
Covid was far from the whole story: her two-and-a-half years saw an outbreak of mpox, a US re-emergence of polio and just this past week, the country’s first locally acquired case of malaria in two decades. She leaves a long to-do list for incoming director Mandy Cohen: replenishing a decimated public-health workforce, launching a new Covid booster campaign and collecting data about maternal mortality in the wake of Roe v. Wade’s reversal.
Cohen will officially begin her duties on July 9, according to an email obtained by Bloomberg News. In the interim, Principal Deputy Director Nirav Shah will serve as acting director.
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Walensky’s biggest concern for her successor is political and ideological polarization that rivens the US. The sniping has undermined the CDC, along with other health and science agencies like the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases formerly led by the widely questioned and criticized Anthony Fauci.
“I thought we’d be unified against a common enemy,” Walensky, 54, said on Thursday at the CDC’s Atlanta headquarters in her last interview as director. “Ultimately, we became each other’s enemies.”
The apparatus that Walensky helped erect to fight the pandemic is rapidly being dismantled. Earlier this week, Walensky downgraded the CDC’s Covid-19 response, according to an email obtained by Bloomberg News, passing responsibility from the full agency to its National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.
The flow of billions of dollars from the American Rescue Plan and Covid supplemental funds has run dry. Pandemic-era measures allowing data collection on community transmission have disappeared. Funds for a program to boost confidence in vaccination were erased as part of a debt-ceiling deal. The White House has dissolved its Covid task force and is dragging its feet in creating its new Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response.
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Still, more than 6,000 Americans are hospitalized with Covid each week, and some 41,000 deaths have been reported this year. About 15% of Americans have had symptoms of long Covid, a mysterious coda to the unpredictable disease. Toward the end of each year, the prospect of cooler weather brings with it the possibility of another surge in infections.
“As we look to the fall, there’s not going to be the confidence outreach and equity work that’s foundational to getting vaccines into arms,” Walensky said, gravely. “I’m worried about that for the country.”
Barbs Coming
Walensky herself has observed shortcoming in the agency she directs, and made changes in work rules aimed at converting its sluggish academic culture into a more responsive, action-oriented stance. She’s hired new leadership, required employees be ready to deploy to crises and created offices to address health equity and surveillance. Yet less than a quarter of the project’s objectives have been reached.
“There’s a vision and a plan,” she said. “They don’t need my presence to do that.”
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She’s counting on Cohen to steer towards those goals. The new chief has a strong management record, having served as health secretary for North Carolina and more recently as head of a new division at Aledade, a closely held company that helps US doctors improve care and cut costs.
The barbs are already coming. Republican Senator Ted Cruz parodied Cohen in a tweet, calling her a “Masking Queen” in a video set to music from Abba’s 1976 hit, Dancing Queen.
Walensky said she’s looking forward to “being out of the spotlight.”
Final Goodbyes
On Thursday morning, she delivered her formal goodbyes to a room full of hundreds of CDC employees. Wearing a bright red blazer, she fought back tears during her farewell address. While the public may be divided on her performance, her staff lauded her with three standing ovations.
Walensky said she hasn’t had time to think about what she’d like to do once she finishes at the CDC on Friday.
She plans to take time off, join her family at the beach and then “cast a wide net” for future jobs, which could include a return to academia, a stint in industry or at a foundation, or even a book. She said she has a “soft spot” for HIV work — she’s recognized globally for efforts on screening — and is passionate about fighting antibiotic resistance and building back the public-health workforce.
“There would have never been a good time to leave,” said Walensky. “I’ve given everything I could.”
(Updates with Cohen’s start date and interim director in fourth paragraph)
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