Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is getting credit for a mea culpa for saying what seems obvious: “For 75 years, the CDC and public health have been preparing for COVID-19, and in our big moment, our performance did not reliably meet expectations,”
This is a classic act of contrition theater, in which Walensky avoids taking any responsibility for the agency’s failure to understand the threat the nation faced or the CDC’s unfounded “guidance” regarding how to slow the spread of COVID, measures that the agency now acknowledges are flawed.
It is not a small issue that CDC personnel undermined respected scientists outside of government who quarreled with mask mandates, social distancing, shutting schools, closing businesses, and promoting universal vaccination with serums whose known risks to some were downplayed. All this while dismissing Americans who doubted that the CDC had a monopoly on “the science.”
In truth, the CDC did a great deal of damage to public faith in science and enormous damage to public trust in government writ large. The more consequential cost, of course, is what epidemiologists know as excess death — those whose lives were lost following government guidance on how to save their lives.
Walensky’s apology came as a prelude to the release of an internal review of the CDC’s management that she ordered in April in response to growing criticism including the threat of a congressionally mandated investigating commission.
thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/3612085-the-cdc-is-broken-and-apologies-cant-fix-it/
h/t Wexy