New CDC chief takes over during deadliest virus phase
NEW YORK — A new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director is arriving to a mammoth task: reasserting the agency while the pandemic is in its deadliest phase yet and the nation’s largest-ever vaccination campaign is wracked by confusion and delays.
The task falls to Dr. Rochelle Walensky, 51, an infectious-diseases specialist at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, who was sworn in Wednesday. She takes the helm at a time when the virus’s U.S. death toll has eclipsed 400,000 and continues to accelerate.
While the agency has retained some of its top scientific talent, public health experts say, it has a long list of needs, including new protection from political influence, a comprehensive review of its missteps during the pandemic and more money to beef up basic functions like disease tracking and genetic analysis.
Walensky has said one of her top priorities will be to improve the CDC’s communications with the public to rebuild trust. Inside the agency, she wants to raise morale, in large part by restoring the primacy of science and setting politics to the side.
The speed at which she is assuming the job is unusual. In the past, the position has generally been unfilled until a new secretary of health and human services is confirmed, and that official names a CDC director. But this time, the Biden transition team named Walensky in advance, so she could take the agency’s reins even before her boss is in place.
Walensky, an HIV researcher, has not worked at the CDC or at a state or local health department. But she has emerged as a prominent voice on the pandemic, sometimes criticizing certain aspects of the state and national response. Her targets have included the uneven transmission-prevention measures that were in place last summer and an endorsement of a “herd immunity” approach, that would let the virus run free, by a prominent adviser to former President Donald Trump.
Meanwhile, a number of states are reporting they are running out of vaccine, and tens of thousands of people who managed to get appointments for a first dose are seeing them canceled.
The reason for the apparent mismatch between supply and demand in the U.S. was unclear, but last week the Health and Human Services Department suggested that states had unrealistic expectations for how much vaccine was on the way.
In any case, new shipments go out every week, and both the government and the drugmakers have said there are large quantities in the pipeline.
The shortages are coming as states dramatically ramp up their vaccination drives, at the federal government’s direction, to reach people 65 and older, along with certain others.
President Joe Biden has made it clear that his administration will take a stronger hand in attacking the crisis, and he vowed to administer
100 million shots in his first
100 days.
Public health officials have said the gap could reflect record-keeping delays as well as disarray and other failings at various levels of government in actually getting shots into arms.
In a statement, the Health and Human Services Department said that jurisdictions actually received about a 5% increase in vaccine allocations this week from what they got in the past couple of weeks.
Separately, California reported its second-highest number of covid-19 deaths Wednesday but also a dip in hospitalizations below 20,000 for the first time since Dec. 27.
The 694 new deaths is second to the record 708 reported Jan. 8, according to the state Department of Public Health. Hospitalizations stood at 19,979.