Dr. Rochelle Walensky became director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in January 2021, a fraught time in the country’s public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, she's preparing to step down. Ahead of her exit on June 30, I talked to Walensky about what she hopes her legacy will be, and why the CDC remains hampered when it comes to collecting data from health departments.
Among the highlights of our conversation:
On restoring people's trust in the agency: “I really did not expect that there would be so many people who were working to undermine the message of science, the message of public health," Walensky told me.
On criticism about advice CDC provided during the pandemic: “We are charged with making big decisions when sometimes the science is not clear.”
On helping the public understand what the CDC can and can't do: “When people ask, we want to see the data from CDC, please also ask the question, does CDC actually get the data that you're looking to get from CDC? Because oftentimes, we don't.”
Four cases of mosquito-transmitted Plasmodium vivax malaria have been reported in Florida within the last two months, and a single case was also found in Texas.
