The CDC: Mixed and muddled messaging
Confusion has become a dangerous variant in the Covid-19 pandemic, said Renée Graham in The Boston Globe, “and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is spreading it.” CDC chief Dr. Rochelle Walensky has come under fire for a series of policy reversals and confusing messages. Back in May, Walensky announced that vaccinated Americans could stop wearing masks indoors, which proved premature once the Delta variant appeared. After Omicron’s arrival, she “abruptly” cut the recommended isolation time for Covid patients from 10 days to five if symptoms end, without advising a negative rapidantigen test to verify that people are no longer infectious. In another stumble, said Aaron Blake in The Washington Post, Walensky proclaimed this week that it was “really encouraging news” that new research found that three-quarters of vaccinated people who died of Covid had multiple underlying conditions such as obesity or diabetes. She was trying to say that healthy vaccinated people rarely get seriously ill or die, but vaccine skeptics seized on the muddled message as proof that vaccination provided no protection. Walensky is just “not good at this.”
No wonder there’s “a palpable sense of frustration,” said physicians Joseph Sakran and Kavita
Patel in Scientific American. Walensky’s announcements came a week after Delta Air Lines executives wrote a letter describing Covid’s disruption of their workforce and urging the CDC to cut the isolation time. That raised suspicions she was responding to “pressure from the business community” instead of hard science. If that’s true, Walensky deserves credit, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. “Protecting public health requires balancing social and economic considerations,” and by cutting the isolation period and letting people get back to work, Walensky is finally “marrying science with economic reality.”
Walensky, a long-respected infectious-disease researcher, now has “an extraordinarily difficult job,” said Katherine Wu in The Atlantic. She’s tasked with giving the American people simple and practical advice “based on evidence that’s both limited and rapidly evolving by the day.” Still, even fellow public-health experts agree that she’s flailing. The new, five-day quarantine guideline came with a dizzying host of qualifiers and exceptions, and the American Medical Association warned that it risks “further spread of the virus.” And as Omicron’s spread obliterates previous Covid infection records, “the costs of muddled messaging are extraordinarily high.”