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In an announcement Friday, the head of the embattled firm said she would step down in June. “We have made this world a safer place,” he said.
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By Apoorva Mandavilli and Noah Weiland
Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, will step down June 30, she announced Friday, ending a tumultuous tenure at the country’s most sensible public fitness firm as it battled the Covid-19 pandemic, the largest. risk to American well-being in decades.
His departure comes as management faces significant vacancies in its Covid-19 reaction team. Ashish Jha, the White House Covid-19 coordinator, plans to step down this month, along with other key officials, adding Dr. Nahid Bhadelia, the White House adviser on the global reaction. A new pandemic the White House has no boss or staff.
Management plans to end the public fitness emergency on May 11, shutting down core systems, such as access to loose tests, that helped Americans in the worst days of the pandemic.
But the virus hasn’t gone away. It still kills about 1,000 Americans each week and hospitalizes even more. The leadership vacuum comes at a precarious time.
At an agency-wide meeting, Dr. Walensky admitted to having mixed feelings about her resolution and burst into tears, according to others who had participated in a convention call with her.
“I assumed this position with the purpose of leaving behind the dark days of the pandemic and moving the CDC, and the public fitness, to a much larger and more reliable place,” he said in a subsequent email to CDC staff.
Dr. Walensky did not respond to a request for comment. Senior management officials and outdoor experts said Dr. Walensky struggled with an unwieldy leadership design at the Department of Health and Human Services, adding that the CDC is a part. The agency’s relationship with the White House was strained, as its recommendation to the public seemed confusing or contradictory.
One user familiar with his way of thinking said Dr. Walensky also grew tired of harassing members of the public who were dissatisfied with pandemic restrictions and long commutes between C. D. C. offices in Atlanta and his home in Massachusetts.
Andy Slavitt, a key adviser to the White House Covid-19 team in 2021, praised Dr. Walensky’s efforts to perform a task that is “easy to criticize and to perform. “
“You are in a state of emergency with an express task to do,” he added. “It’s almost like a mission, with a beginning and an end. Even if she ran a company, running a company in wartime is different from running a company. firm in peacetime.
Public fitness experts said the news came as a blast and some expressed sadness at his departure.
“I think it’s a loss for the CDC and for the nation,” said Dr. Brown. Megan Ranney, Associate Dean of the School of Public Health at Brown University. “I know it hasn’t been easy, not only because of covid, but also because of the politicization of science. “
Dr. Ranney said she had won hate mail and non-public attacks, but that what she had experienced was “just the tip of the iceberg” compared to the way Dr. Ranney had been treated. Walensky.
Dr. Celine Gounder, a former adviser to the Biden administration who has had Dr. Walensky since 2004, said, “His departure tells me that the CDC is more broken and that the federal government’s commitment to public health is even weaker than I thought. “
Dr. Walensky grew up in Potomac, Maryland, in a circle of relatives of renowned scientists. She trained in medicine at Johns Hopkins University and, in 2001, joined the Harvard faculty, where she earned a reputation as a rigorous researcher and generous mentor.
Prior to her role as CDC, Dr. Walensky led the Division of Infectious Diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital, where she witnessed the devastation of the pandemic. She is known for her paintings on physical care policies, specifically in the domain of HIV.
But with little experience functioning in government and major giant institutions, Dr. Walensky was unexpectedly chosen to advise a company with a workforce of around 11,000.
Dr. Walensky took over as director of the embattled company in January 2021. He had an almost unlikely task ahead of him: repairing the reputation of the former CDC when public trust in the company, and science in general, was waning.
The C. D. C. had been criticized since the beginning of the pandemic for missteps in testing, adjustments in masking councils, and surveillance and knowledge systems. The crisis skyrocketed.
“She insisted that other people act faster and in a more targeted way, so she encouraged other people to do things maybe a little bit more than they did,” said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease physician at Vanderbilt University who works extensively with the agency. .
“Morale within the CDC took a remarkable step forward under his leadership,” he added.
But the pandemic has proved to be a complicated terrain, even for one Dr. Walensky so reputed and appreciated. Experts have roundly criticized her for advising others to avoid wearing her mask just weeks before the Delta variant of the coronavirus arrives in the country. .
And after shortening isolation requirements even as the Omicron variant paralyzed the country, he accused of letting economic interests trump clinical prudence.
Anne Sosin, who studies fitness equity at Dartmouth, said Walensky has at times taken the downfall of the Biden administration’s decisions, but he may also have done more to tell the public the reason for those decisions.
Still, Sosin added, “From the outside, it seemed that Dr. Walensky did not have the courage to say no to decisions that actually undermined public health. “
Congressional Republicans have continually called for his resignation and portrayed the company as a bankrupt establishment in pandemic hearings. But some experts felt that Dr. Walensky did the best he could with a very unlikely hand.
“The public, and even medical professionals, sought consistency in messages and messages that are not possible, because Covid was never a static threat,” said Dr. Jeremy Faust, an emergency physician and fitness policy expert at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. In Boston.
Dr Daniel Pollock, who led covid surveillance for a few months in 2020 and retired in November 2021 after 37 years at the agency, said: “The timing of this leadership transition is very problematic. I have worked at the CDC under the direction of 10 other directors. , and when they leave abruptly, for a reason, domino effects wreak havoc.
It was not immediately transparent who would lead the CDC. Some scientists have said that Dr. Walensky’s successor will be a public health generalist sensitive to social problems and control of a large federal agency, not a physician-researcher like Dr. Walensky.
“It has to be a public fitness person,” said Katelyn Jetelina, an epidemiologist who writes a popular newsletter and called on the CDC to continue for the next year. “We’re thinking about treating millions of other people at the same time, in addition to this early education. “of individual medical care. “
Despite the controversy surrounding her mandate, Dr. Walensky told members on Friday that he believed he had advanced the agency’s position.
“We have jointly moved CDC forward, reorganized the company and adopted the paints to guide the company toward public action and encourage accountability, timeliness and transparency in our paintings,” he said.
During his time at the CDC, Dr. Walensky noted, the company administered more than 670 million doses of the Covid vaccine and provided recommendations on vaccination, social distancing, and mask wearing that “protected the country and the world from the increased risk of infectious diseases that we have noticed. “in more than a hundred years.
Dr. Walensky cited the agency’s failures last year and promised to revamp it, transforming its ability to respond temporarily to public health crises. Some organizational changes have been announced, but it’s unclear if any of them have made a difference to the CDC’s cadres.
Among other changes, Dr. Walensky helped create a more organized and empowered workplace to work with national and local fitness developments, said Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, associate dean of public fitness practice and networking at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Health.
“It puts the company in a position to have a vision of how the country’s very intricate public fitness formula holds together,” he said. “One of the director’s will be to take the design that Dr. Walensky left behind and use it. “
Under his leadership, Dr. Walensky said in his email to members, the company has strengthened its public fitness infrastructure and secured millions of dollars to modernize the country’s knowledge infrastructure.
He also said racism is a serious public health risk, he noted, and led the company in its efforts to involve a multinational outbreak of mpox, as well as the spread of Ebola in Uganda.
“We have made this world a safer place,” Dr. Walensky said. “I’ve never been so proud of what I’ve done in my professional career. “
Emily Anthes, Sharon LaFraniere and Benjamin Mueller contributed to the report.
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