“I actually really think many people have thought this is CDC’s responsibility, to fix public health the pandemic,” Walensky said. In an interview with POLITICO earlier this year, she said the CDC alone would not be able to bring Covid-19 under control, and called for broader investment in public health at the state and local levels. Walensky has repeatedly pointed out that the agency was underfunded before the pandemic started, noting that the public health workforce was seriously depleted and the agency has been hamstrung by structural issues, including limited access to data from states. Several school districts, including those in New York City and Philadelphia, are taking more precautions than the CDC now recommends as students return. Last week, the CDC’s decision to lift quarantine recommendations for unvaccinated individuals exposed to the virus, including in schools, also drew criticism from doctors and public health experts who say the agency is embracing individual responsibility over public health when it is responsible for the latter. This spring, its shift to assessing community-level risk by weighing hospitalizations and the burden on the health care system over the level of transmission was both confusing and put Americans at unnecessary risk, many public health experts say. This year, the agency has struggled to strike a balance between the competing interests of a virus that continues to find ways to evade vaccines and natural immunity, and a public that is weary of taking the sort of precautions that federal and state governments have mandated.Īs the Omicron variant swept the nation, the agency came under fire for shortening its recommended quarantine guidelines. The government has appealed a Florida federal district court judge’s April decision to strike the CDC’s directive that people wear masks on airplanes, trains and other public conveyances. Last year, the Supreme Court struck down its moratorium on evictions during the pandemic. The CDC’s authority has been challenged in multiple court cases. It has fended off a battery of allegations over the course of the crisis, from putting politics over its vow to “follow the science” to bungling messaging to putting Americans’ lives at risk as pandemic restrictions have eased.Īs public health officials came under attack across the country, so has the agency’s authority to implement Covid-19 mitigation measures, with critics on one side accusing the agency of federal overreach and critics on the other accusing the agency of not doing enough.
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The CDC has come under intense pressure from Americans of all political stripes since the earliest days of the pandemic.
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“Maybe the way that a lot of the response was structured, and some of the incentives that people have here, are just not aligned properly to really put the focus toward getting information to people quickly and how that information can benefit Americans’ health.” An embattled agency “People work incredibly, incredibly hard and care deeply about trying to make sure that the American people have the right information,” the official said. There is consensus within the CDC that it “needs to make some changes for how it communicates and how it operates - to be faster, to be nimbler, to use more plain spoken language,” said a CDC official, who was granted anonymity to discuss the changes before they were announced.
TIMES NEWSLETTERS DIRECTOR CHANGES SERIES
Specifically, Macrae’s review, which included 120 interviews with CDC staffers and people outside the agency, recommended a series of improvements, including releasing scientific findings and data more quickly to improve transparency, translating science into practical and easy-to-understand policy, improving communication with the public, working better with other agencies and public health partners, and training and incentivizing the agency’s workforce to respond better to public health emergencies. The reviews concluded that the “traditional scientific and communication processes were not adequate to effectively respond to a crisis the size and scope of the COVID-19 pandemic,” according to an agency statement.
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The CDC restructuring follows two reviews conducted in recent months, one by Health Resources and Services Administration official Jim Macrae into the CDC’s pandemic response and another by CDC Chief of Staff Sherri Berger into agency operations.