CDC director makes startling admissions about pandemic response

In a candid interview-format presentation Thursday at her alma mater, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky made a number of significant admissions about her agency’s messaging and handling of data during the deadly COVID-19 pandemic, affirming the concerns of many health scientists who have been censored and maligned over the past two years as purveyors of “misinformation.”

She admitted, among other things, in her remarks at the Washington University Medical School in St. Louis that:

• The CDC exercised “too little caution and too much optimism” about the effectiveness of the vaccines in preventing infection, transmission and deaths.
• She was “proud of our ability to get data out,” describing a new, “modern” data assimilation and analysis system that provided crucial information on vaccine effectiveness to health care officials and the public about every 48 hours. The comment is significant in light of the recent admission of unnamed CDC officials to the New York Times that the agency has withheld most of its data regarding COVID-19 — presumably including data regarding the adverse effects of vaccines — for fear it would be misinterpreted by critics. And she still has not fulfilled her promise to a senator on Jan. 11 to provide “the data” on vaccine-related deaths.
• When she declared during the pandemic that the CDC would “lead with the science,” the public took that as a statement that science is “foolproof.” But science isn’t “black and white,” Walensky acknowledged Thursday. It’s “gray,” and “sometimes it takes months and years to actually find out the answer.” Johns Hopkins University professor Dr. Marty Makary said recently the CDC has been “using science as political propaganda.”
• The CDC and establishment media emphasized the data regarding cases and deaths. But in future pandemics, the unintended impacts of pandemic mitigation need to be taken into account, Walensky said, such as opioid deaths, mental health challenges, cancer screenings and deferred elective surgeries. That was the message of many medical scientists, including those behind the “Great Barrington Declaration,” who were targeted and maligned by National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins as “fringe epidemiologists.”

At the event Thursday, Walensky was interviewed by Dr. William G. Powderly, the co-director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Washington University. – READ MORE