Rochelle Walensky Leaves a CDC That's Far More Powerful Than When She Entered It
Under Walensky, the CDC's voluntary guidance was anything but.
Rochelle Walensky is resigning from her post as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). She has overseen the agency since the beginning of President Joe Biden's term and greatly expanded the CDC's authority.
Walensky's reign was chiefly characterized by her extreme reluctance to reverse the CDC's support for ongoing pandemic restrictions. When she took the helm in January 2021, the COVID-19 vaccine rollout was just getting underway, and there was good reason to believe that the most vulnerable people would soon enjoy robust protection from severe disease and death. Walensky, however, was not inclined to let the CDC's influence wane. For instance, she repeatedly extended the CDC's eviction moratorium, a policy that made it extremely difficult for landlords to collect rent; the Supreme Court finally struck down the illegal order in August 2021.
Walensky firmly believed that CDC guidance on COVID-19 policies should reflect the up-to-date scientific consensus—that is, unless the science had arrived at a conclusion that vexed her. Walensky's CDC put incredible faith in junk studies that purported to prove the importance of mask mandates in schools. When the legitimacy of these studies came into question, she declined to reverse course and admit that ritualistically masking schoolchildren was unnecessary. As late as February 2022, she still maintained that "masking should happen in all schools right now."
When challenged on her policies, Walensky would demur and claim that CDC guidance on masks was just that—guidance. She sounded a similar note as COVID-19 adviser Anthony Fauci, who cloaked his enthusiasm for shutting down all of society under the guise of mere suggestion. The fact of the matter is that government policy makers at the local, state, and federal level routinely outsourced their COVID-19 decision making to Walensky and Fauci. They put their thumbs on the scales of lockdowns and mask mandates, and thus the U.S. continued these policies far longer than did our peer countries. The World Health Organization (WHO), in contrast, never recommended masks for children under 6 at all, and many Nordic countries were unwilling to mask kids up to age 11.
Of course, Walensky wasn't necessarily looking to European peer countries for advice. She was far more inclined to celebrate the alleged success of China's "really strict lockdowns," which involved the country's authoritarian government starving some people via mandatory quarantine detention centers and trapping others inside burning buildings. (China eventually succumbed to the inevitable, gave up on its draconian lockdowns, and implicitly admitted that the "zero-COVID" policy was a fantasy.)
Walensky's CDC also pursued the questionable strategy of purging so-called misinformation about COVID-19 from social media. Throughout her time in charge, the CDC became the de facto internet speech police. Emails obtained by Reason show that Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, routinely deferred moderation decisions to government health authorities.
Meta might have thought it had little choice but to seek the CDC's input, as Biden had publicly declared that the social media platform's failure to suppress allegedly misleading content was "killing people." In any case, this is a dangerous precedent, and it represents a serious escalation in the federal bureaucracy's war on disfavored speech.
Walensky's exit from the CDC comes just a few days before the official end of the national COVID-19 pandemic on May 11. Whoever takes over the agency should concentrate on rebalancing its decidedly unhealthy approach to individual liberty.
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Doggie style, obviously.
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Her son is going to take one to summer camp this year.
I mean… Joe Biden campaigned on doing so. What is shocking?
this position may stay open for a while as the biden administration searches high and low for a candidate who is trans
Maybe Rachel Levine can give up his poorly worn admiral’s uniform and take the spot.
Ahem, you mean a trans person of color, preferably Muslim.
Too bad she doesn’t have inoperable ass cancer. The whole lot of them deserve a good dose of inoperable ass cancer.
They ARE ass cancer.
Rochelle Walensky is resigning from her post
I’m assuming the AFT will toss her some sort of pension.
Million dollar book deal.
Walensky’s CDC also pursued the questionable strategy of purging so-called misinformation about COVID-19 from social media.
Questionable??? That’s the word you’re going to use? Government suppression of information that goes against their narrative is questionable?
Does anyone remember when Reason was Libertarian?
It has been awhile.
When paying your rent or commenting on social media falls under the powers of the Centers of Disease Control, they’ve been granted too much power.
Reason was libertarian and objectivist when looter anarchists struggled to set us at each others’ throats. The only thing that’s changed is an infusion of cash and dupes into the hands of communists convinced by Bakunin and Rothbard that the LP is a suitable host for parasitic invasion.
Do you even know what you’re talking about? The two guys you mentioned don’t even have compatible ideologies!
“Does anyone remember when Reason was Libertarian?”
Shows how deep the termites have spread that the Long March Through the Institutions even got around to Reason.
“For instance, she repeatedly extended the CDC’s eviction moratorium” I continue to scratch my head over this one – what in the BLUE BLAZES does the Centers for Disease Control have to do with local rent payers or landlords? Even by the farthest possible stretch of the imagination, preventing evictions does not even come close to preventing the “spread of contagious diseases,” and even then it has nothing whatever to do with Federal policy purview! Goodbye, Walensky – and don’t let the door hit you in the butt on the way out! Another highly-educated dunce promoted above their level of competence …
I think the rationale for the eviction moratoriums was that state/local governments had shut down the jobs (in some cases entire industries) of lower income workers. It was, at its root, an attempt to mitigate the damage they were deliberately inflicting on people who had previously been living “paycheck to paycheck”; something which for service workers in high cost of living “blue” jurisdictions still requires living above their means (and is generally exacerbated by most “progressive” attempts at reducing inequality).
At the beginning of the pandemic, there were already sizeable tent cities around most of the urban parts of the west coast, as well as impromptu “camper parks” and tens of thousands of people living in cars. Evicting people whose jobs had been forcibly closed by the state/county/city governments wasn’t going to help either the public or landlords (who would have had to reduce rents significantly to put apartments back within reach of the RV and van dwellwers); empty units would have just drawn squatters (who in CA can take up to 2 years to evict and frequently do significant damage in the meantime).
It wasn’t well enacted, and it’s definitely authoritarian (likely beyond the actual powers of the agency), but it’s one of the few things the CDC did which may have actually been beneficial in the long view.
That’s one of the most ridiculous circumlocutions I think I’ve ever heard! It doesn’t even begin to explain why it was her job – or CDC’s – to mitigate the economic impact of the pandemic or the economic fallout from state or local lockdowns. Subsequent prevarications from top CDC officials allege that they did not personally or as a matter of Federal policy require any of the lockdowns (except perhaps on international travel), that the states were not required to follow CDC “advice” and that implies that any economic blow-back was strictly the responsibility of state and local government. I think you should reconsider trying to take their side, even theoretically.
I didin’t say it was a good or legally defensible rationale, but it’s the one that was being pushed here in CA, at least the first graf.
The second was a bit of extrapolation on my part based on the facts on the ground here in Los Angeles, and the impact of the multitude of governmental-imposed distortions on housing (it’s almost laughable to try to claim there’s still something like a “market” in play at this point).
Also, whatever possibly “beneficial” results I was referring to absolutely were not intended by the alleged experts who cooked up the policy in the first place. If landlords had evicted people in large numbers during the shutdowns, the bulk of the impact would have been felt in a particular segment of rentals (lower-end apartments and smaller multi-unit “dingbat” type low-rises which are also more likely to be owned by smaller operations or individual investors rather than major developers); higher-end renters here were mostly working jobs which allowed remote work but didn’t close down, and either stayed where they were or left the area entirely to work remotely from a lower-taxed and less restrictive area with solid internet infrastructure.
If lower-end landlords had evicted large numbers of tenants, the fastest way to get those units filled quickly would have been to offer them at below-“market” rents to maybe pull in some of the “RV Homeless” or possibly even some of the same tenants who maybe switched from their shut-down service jobs to driving doordash/uber eats/etc as gig work but didn’t net as much weekly at that work after gas/vehicle costs. Units sitting empty plus a large homeless population is a recipe for squatters to take over a smaller building or duplex/triplex if the owner isn’t on site full time, and often brings in a kind of squatters who’d be prone to pulling the copper wire and pipes out of the walls if left alone for long enough (which local laws and enforcement policies more or less guarantee will happen). None of this is to say that the landlords involved deserve to have their property destroyed if they choose to leave it un-rented (short-term rental like Air-BnB or Vrbo weren’t a great alternative when everything travelers might want to see was forcibly closed), but there’d have been a high probability of that happening if they had evicted previously decent tenants who had found themselves forcibly rendered unable to pay on time; rent control and limits on increases might have created some incentives to evict some longer-term individual tenants but not to clear entire buildings necessarily, but even at that, any pool of prospective new tenants with an ability to pay was crushed at the same time as the existing resident populations of such properties, and by the same policies.
The federal government provided a rent help program that provided $ to States to pay landlords. Major problem being they were completely incompetent. Biden sent a little shy of a billion dollars to MN in December, by September they had appropriated less than a million. It was so inept that after maybe 100 hours of customer service we had to call the Attorney General for help. Got paid 10 months later, to the wrong owners, wrong payees etc. Many people could not have waited that long before bankruptcy. It also taught tenants that the rent isn’t a bill they need to pay.
Those sizeable tent cities were not there before Reagan unleashed the dogs of Prohibition on harmless LSD. Hippies brought cash thither to score, return and illuminate. Before long, acid from Austin was cheaper than the West Coast product. Adding Nixon’s National Socialism finished off the economy, bringing 1930s-style Hoovervilles back to whence they originally sprang forth. Totalitarianism, surprise! brought violence and poverty, and repeated the act in 2008. (https://tinyurl.com/2p8n8sw9)
Kennedy’s order to close all of the state mental hospitals and replace them with outpatient “care centers” played a much bigger part. It doesn’t get noticed because it allowed more than 20 year of “transition” period, probably with the expectation that the State/Local authorities would use that time to formulate well-considered plans; very few did so, and once the hospitals closed and thousands of people too mentally ill to function independently were released onto the streets (and in CA now can only be put into any kind of restriction if the affirmatively agree to it, which not a lot of schizophrenics are willing to do.
Bankrupting the owners wasn’t beneficial in the long run.
It’s clear the eviction moratorium was an initiative that came from the top (the people that immediately manage Biden), not something Walensky invented and implemented solo.
They just routed it through public health so they could take advantage of broadly worded laws for dealing with public health emergencies.
So, are “the people” the Chicoms? Russia’s KGB Czar? Raul Castro? Florida Realtors? Inquiring minds wanna know.
You have no common sense. Would be good if you go get one.
This resignation is more than 24 months overdue IMO.
At the very least, she should have either resigned or been fired within 24 hours of the pressser in which she was “on the clock” and used the phrase “sense of impending doom” (March 29, 2021 from what I can find via google).
There were probably a couple of incidents before that which should have made it clear she was never fit for at least the public-facing portion of the job; and the number of times she made public announcements or gave briefings to officials including claims which were contradicted by the data publicly available on the CDC website at the time. One time, she even advised Biden to push for a policy that was the near opposite of what her own agency announced less than 24 hours later; that has to be either some kind of malicious intent or unforgivable incompetence by someone (and no matter who, she’d be ultimately responsible as the head of the agency).
I guess that with the “emergency” officially ended, her potential to do further harm isn’t worth the continuing stress of the job? Something tells me she’ll be a lobbyist for Pfizer within 8 months.
Resignation, or firing, is far too kind.
When a government official exceeds her legitimate power, she should be charged and tried and jailed if convicted.
True that.
I’ve said the same about Gavin Newsom; my opinion is that he should be in prison for what he did during the pandemic. Problem is, in both cases that they’d possibly be protected by “qualified immunity” if they were to claim that what they did on the job was what they thought was the best thing for the public interest. Also, I don’t know that there’s any law covering abuse of “emergency” powers by executive branch officials.
Also, at least in the case of Newsom, the majority of the other voters in CA think he either “did his best” and fell short, or that he’s some kind of “visionary hero” who would have made everyone immortal if it hadn’t been for the anti-mask protests in OC (which had lower per capita covid numbers than the compliant parts of L.A. throughout the entire pandemic) and Joe Rogan’s “horse paste” (since Vox/CNN are more authoritative sources for what was actually said than listening to the recorded content that’s freely available).
If I could change just one thing about the original United States Constitution it would be to add a clause requiring judicial branch review of every new law passed by Congress, every new Executive Order signed by the President, and every new regulation created by a regulatory agency before allowing it to take effect. It would not be perfect, given the actual judicial malfeasance history of the United States, but it would create jurisdiction that would obviate the delay and expense of private citizens suing over unconstitutional laws, regulations and enforcement actions; and possibly the erosion of constitutional limits via the sheer volume from government officials with nothing better to do; and exhaustion of limited private resources over time.
Great point!
“Rochelle Walensky Leaves a CDC That’s Far More Powerful Than When She Entered It”
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!
You beat me to it.
Powerful and incompetent. I don’t know if Walensky made the incompetence any worse, or merely put it on display.
More powerful? I only have utter contempt for anything they are involved in. Did not have such hard feelings towards them before this pandemic ordeal.
Well, “more powerful” doesn’t mean you won’t have utter contempt for them. They’re still more powerful now than they were back when you didn’t have such hard feelings for them. I had utter contempt for the CDC starting about the time they stopped limiting themselves to detecting incoming contagious threats to the United States and started concentrating on overweight Americans and their diet.
Exactly. Machiavelli. It is more valuable to be feared than loved.
This chick didn’t care if we believed in the message, or the CDC. More of a do what you’re told or lose your job, your property, and your freedom thing.
They couldn’t even stop the zombies on The Walking Dead
OK, semi-seriously, why are so many of these public health Nazis women (or at appear to match the pre-woke criteria for birthing persons)? Are they literal nanny fascists? Do more women than men hate freedom? Who makes the sandwiches?
They put their thumbs on the scales of lockdowns and mask mandates, and thus the U.S. continued these policies far longer than did our peer countries.
Gosh. You mean people in most every other country on Earth knew what they were doing and we didn’t? How could we have possibly learned any of this?
Fuck off and die, asshole.
“Rochelle Walensky Leaves a CDC That’s Far More Powerful Than When She Entered It”
And far more dangerous; the CDC caused the ruin of a large part of the US mall business population already. Take the CDD out behind the barn and kill it with a pitchfork.
It’s a strange net effect.
More policy makers at more levels seem to be inclined to just follow whatever the CDC “reccomends”; possibly since there’s a way to weasel out of accountability for the consequences of that choice.
On the other hand, the agency, along with FDA and NIH, may have lost at least 30-40% of their pre-pandemic credibility with the public, and there’s a large portion of the populace now who won’t default to believing that what those agencies put out to the public anymore, and might even reflexively oppose future recommendations whether or not they are sensible or based in actual credible data. Outside of those people who still trust the NYT/CNN/NPR/WaPo/MSNBC media block, those who replace Fauci and Walensky will have to put in some work to re-establish any significant level of credibility for their offices and agencies.
The ruinous bitch was consistently wrong about everything but then she was aware of the errors.
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The CDC is less powerful. It has lost all credibility with the public.
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Is not to worry comrade, Walensky has some options waiting in the wings: Moderna, Merck and Pfizer. Of course she could always just check out and leave the rest of us the hell alone but we all know she won’t. Like Fauci, she’s a controlling narcissist and probably psychopath. She loves power. So don’t count her out yet unless she meets up with an accident on a New York subway.
Don’t expect to see her on Joe Rogan either.