
ICYMI: WSJ: New CDC Director Pledges to Speed Vaccination, Restore Trust in Agency
"We need to build a sustainable public health infrastructure across the country, because one of the reasons that we're in this mess is because we didn't have it."
WASHINGTON - In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director-designate Dr. Rochelle Walensky detailed how she will get to work on day one of the Biden-Harris administration to combat Covid-19, ramp up vaccinations across the country, and increase public trust in the agency.
Dr. Walensky elaborated on the plans she and other incoming officials have been working on to achieve the goal of 100 million shots in 100 days by reaching individuals in underserved communities, investing in mobile clinics, and implementing an education campaign. She reaffirmed her commitment to ask for a review of the agency's Covid-19 guidance and outlined her top priorities including strengthening the nation's public health infrastructure and modernizing the CDC's outdated data systems.
Read the full piece below.
WSJ: New CDC Director Pledges to Speed Vaccination, Restore Trust in Agency
[By Betsy McKay, 1/19/20]
Rochelle Walensky, the incoming director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said she will start her new job with a big to-do list: helping states fix Covid-19 vaccination programs and persuading exhausted Americans to wear masks and take other precautions.
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Dr. Walensky said the agency will try to help people overcome doubts about Covid-19 vaccines and she vowed to increase public trust in the CDC.
Dr. Walensky will take the helm of the CDC on Wednesday, as a highly transmissible mutant, or variant, of the novel coronavirus threatens to cause a new surge in infections in the next few weeks.
Meanwhile, the vaccination campaign to stop the pandemic is off to a slow start, and surveys show many people in the U.S. are hesitant to get vaccinated.
"This is an emergency," Dr. Walensky said, as she got paperwork for her new job done so she could get right to work immediately after the change in administrations. New presidents often wait weeks or months to name CDC directors.
Dr. Walensky will replace Robert Redfield, the CDC's director since 2018.
Stopping the pandemic will require convincing people to wear masks and follow other measures to slow the virus, while picking up the pace of vaccinations, she said, particularly as variants like the one first identified in the U.K. proliferate.
"The less disease out there, the less work we have to do, the fewer variants we are going to see," she said.
The coronavirus variant first identified in the U.K. has now caused at least 122 cases in 20 U.S. states. CDC scientists predict it will become the dominant strain in March unless measures are put in place to slow it, and are also closely watching other variants they fear will also circulate in the U.S.
The incoming administration of President-elect Joe Biden plans to accelerate vaccinations by boosting supplies, matching the number of people who are eligible for vaccines to the number of doses available and hiring retired health-care workers, public health officers and others to administer the shots.
The plan also includes making vaccines easier for people to get, particularly those in underserved communities.
"We want to do mobile clinics, because not everybody is going to be able to get to a stadium," Dr. Walensky said. "We want to bring those clinics to the people, to the communities where they otherwise wouldn't have had adequate outreach."
Mr. Biden has pledged to deliver 100 million doses within his first 100 days, which may be an easy target, depending on supply. Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar said last week that about 700,000 vaccinations were being administered daily on average, and the nation was on track to hit one million shots a day in the coming days. "We would prefer to underpromise and overdeliver," Dr. Walensky said.
Demand for vaccines currently outstrips supply. Yet about 27% of U.S. adults don't plan to get a shot, according to a December survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation, and many health-care workers declined one when offered.
It is important for the CDC to reach out to people now who say they don't want the vaccine, whether that is due to convenience or concerns about the science or of missing work, Dr. Walensky said.
"Right now is the time to do that outreach, to do that education, to understand why it is they may not want it and what it is that they need to understand in order to want it," she said.
Dr. Walensky, 51 years old, comes to the CDC as a physician and researcher known for her analyses showing the benefits of early treatment for HIV patients and generic-based drug regimens for them. She hadn't worked at the agency before.
Citing the urgent needs created by the pandemic, some public health experts argued the new CDC director should be a veteran of the agency or a public-health department.
Dr. Walensky, who said she was surprised to be asked to lead the agency, said she believes she was chosen as an outsider to the system on purpose.
As chief of infectious diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, she was at the forefront of fighting Covid-19 for months both on the hospital floor and in policy-making. She described experiences that shape how she thinks the CDC should tackle the pandemic.
She saw early on, she said, the impact of the new disease on underserved populations. Reviewing patient lists, "all of the names were Hispanic," she said. Many didn't speak English.
She also saw, she said, the impact of changes to CDC recommendations while serving on Covid-19 advisory groups for Massachusetts' Republican Gov. Charlie Baker and helping devise strategies to safely reopen the state's economy.
In her roles, she said, she relied on recommendations from the CDC on risks of transmission and other matters. Those documents were sometimes altered by White House officials seeking to control broad elements of the Covid-19 response.
"You'd hear from the news that a guideline got changed, not from the CDC as to why it got changed," she said. "We need the people who did the science telling us what's the new science that led to the change."
Dr. Walensky vowed to restore public trust in the CDC, which surveys show sagged after the Trump administration interfered in decision making and the agency made its own mistakes, such as botching the rollout of a diagnostic test for detecting Covid-19.
She also expressed hope the incoming Biden administration can set a new tone for the public about the fight against the virus.
"I think they will be able to turn on the news and see that there's pedal to the metal in terms of our working to get this under control," she said. "People want the economy open, people want schools open."
Among her first steps as director will be to ask for a review of the agency's Covid-19 recommendations to make sure that they are scientifically sound.
"What I just want to do is make sure that when I get there, that everybody knows and understands that what is on the CDC website is endorsed by the CDC," she said.
The CDC will hold regular press briefings, release current data, and will announce changes in recommendations, said Dr. Walensky, who is moving on Friday to Atlanta, where the CDC is based. "There will be way more communication, the science will be out there," she said.
She said she may seek an external review of how the CDC's Covid-19 diagnostic test was botched, which hampered testing for the virus in the crucial initial weeks it was spreading in the U.S.
Also among her top priorities, she said, are strengthening the nation's public-health departments, which have suffered from years of funding and staff cuts, and modernizing the CDC's outdated data systems.
Those steps will require substantial new funds from Congress. "I plan to be there often," she said.
"We need to build a sustainable public-health infrastructure across the country, because one of the reasons that we're in this mess is because we didn't have it," she said.
Joseph R. Biden, Jr., ICYMI: WSJ: New CDC Director Pledges to Speed Vaccination, Restore Trust in Agency Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/375927