Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky on Thursday complained about mistrust and criticism over “how to communicate to people” who are skeptical of the agencies “data driven” recommendations.
“I am really struggling with how to communicate to people who are worried about politics, and I just want them to continue to be at their family’s dinner table,” Dr. Walensky told the Wall Street Journal. “My job is to put my head down, ignore the criticism and do the right thing for the public and to do the right thing for health.”
The Journal noted that patients Walensky has treated in the past are “generally” trusting of her advice but as the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “she has learned the same isn’t always true of many people in the U.S.”
When Walensky was asked about the CDC’s former guidelines that allowed Americans to live in according with commonsense and individual responsibility by not wearing a mask if one was not vaccinated, she said “permission” was never given but it was “interpreted that way.”
“I couldn’t actually see a pathway that didn’t lead to an honor system,” she explained. “It was never a permission, although it was interpreted that way, for unmasking cities, unmasking jurisdictions.”
“There was an enormous pressure for vaccinated people to be able to do things that they wanted to get back to doing,” she said in reference to the previous decision to allow life to return back to normal just before the the CDC alerted the Biden administration to concerns over the delta variant.
Walensky’s mistrust comes as White House officials are reportedly frustrated by the CDC’s lack of coronavirus data transparency. “Top Biden officials are growing frustrated with the lack of internal visibility into data being collected by the CDC, particularly as they try to deal with Delta’s spread,” Breitbart News reported Monday.
“That’s where the tension is, like ‘Where the hell are the data?’” another source revealed.
As the CDC relies on having current data to promote fact-based policies, the CDC is still relying on its last data dump from April, before the Delta variant. Foreign data dumps, however, have occurred since from Public Health England, the Imperial College London, and from South Africa.
In fact, the Washington Post published a story citing data from an India study that was presumably used to reimplement the mask mandate. But the director of the study, Ravindra Gupta, “confirmed to The Fact Checker that the article had been initially rejected during peer review because a reviewer ‘was not happy with certain aspects.’”
“The paper is now on its fourth revision,” the Post reported. “Research Square only shows the first version — and Gupta said that the ‘high viral loads’ cited by the CDC essentially disappeared in the current version as more information was obtained from a third hospital.”
While the “revised paper is still under review for publication,” the Post also reports that the CDC has distanced “itself from the India study, even though it was cited in the CDC document and also in a CDC slide presentation obtained by The Washington Post.”
Walensky said on July 30 the “India data were not at all used to make this assessment.”
Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter @WendellHusebø & Instagram @WendellHusebo
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