CDC Director Rochelle Walensky Steps Down
Rochelle Walensky resigned Friday from her position as the head of the CDC, citing the end of the Covid-19 pandemic as an optimal transition point to turn over the reins to a successor.
Walensky’s last day will be June 30. An interim CDC director has not yet been announced.
“I have never been prouder of anything I have done in my professional career,” Walensky wrote in a statement announcing her resignation.
Walensky, 54, came on to run the CDC two years ago as the country was navigating the latter half of the Covid pandemic. A career infectious-disease specialist, Walensky had no experience running government agencies when she was tapped by President Biden.
Walensky quickly became the face of the CDC’s reluctance to jettison Covid-mitigation measures that were initially sold to the public as emergency measures when the pandemic emerged in March 2020.
Shortly after taking the helm, Walensky made headlines for confessing during a public presentation on Covid that she felt “a sense of impending doom” about the trajectory of the virus and the country’s ability to respond.
In the spring of 2021, Walensky told vaccinated Americans they could stop wearing masks in public settings, only to reverse course when the Delta variant emerged.
Numerous studies have since emerged which suggest that cloth or surgical masks of the kind most Americans wore throughout the pandemic provide little to no benefit — and Dr. Anthony Fauci, who led the White House’s Coronavirus task force, admitted in a recent New York Times interview that their effect is “marginal.”
Walensky’s tenure at the CDC was also marked by a particularly cozy relationship with teachers’ unions, which pressured the agency to make their school reopening guidelines more stringent. Emails obtained by a watchdog organization in May 2021 revealed that the CDC adopted verbatim reopening guideline language proposed by the American Federation of Teachers.
While the CDC was preparing to declare that all schools could provide in-person learning regardless of the degree of community spread of coronavirus, AFT senior director for health issues Kelly Trautner proposed adding new language stipulating that the guidelines could be revised in the event of high community spread. That language, along with a section exempting high-risk teachers and staff from in-person work, was ultimately adopted.
Walensky’s resignation comes on the same day the World Health Organization officially declared an end to the pandemic.
White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients praised Walensky’s performance in a statement marking her resignation.
“Her creativity, skill and expertise, and pure grit were essential to our effective response and an historic recovery that made life better for Americans across the country,” Zients said.
