Dr. Rochelle Walensky, Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is resigning from her position. The White House has released a statemen:
“Dr. Walensky has saved lives with her steadfast and unwavering focus on the health of every American,” the statement said. “As Director of the CDC, she led a complex organization on the frontlines of a once-in-a-generation pandemic with honesty and integrity. She marshalled our finest scientists and public health experts to turn the tide on the urgent crises we’ve faced.”
“Dr. Walensky leaves CDC a stronger institution, better positioned to confront health threats and protect Americans,” the statement claimed. “We have all benefited from her service and dedication to public health, and I wish her the best in her next chapter.”
Walensky’s departure will take effect on June 30, with no interim director named at the time of the announcement. She submitted her resignation letter to President Joe Biden and informed CDC staff during a meeting.
In the letter to the president, Walensky expressed “mixed feelings” about the decision and stated that the country is experiencing a moment of transition as emergency declarations come to an end. While she did not give a specific reason for her resignation, Walensky stated that she has never been prouder of anything she has done in her professional career.
In a statement, White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients praised her for her performance.
“Her creativity, skill and expertise, and pure grit were essential to our effective response and an historic recovery that made life better for Americans across the country,” Zients said.
Dr. Walensky presided over a disastrous collapse of Americans’ trust in public health while at the CDC. A Pew Survey in 2022 showed the precipitous decline.
“Americans’ confidence in groups and institutions has turned downward compared with just a year ago,” Pew said. “Trust in scientists and medical scientists, once seemingly buoyed by their central role in addressing the coronavirus outbreak, is now below pre-pandemic levels.”
“Overall, 29% of U.S. adults say they have a great deal of confidence in medical scientists to act in the best interests of the public, down from 40% who said this in November 2020,” the survey said.
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky also resigns amid allegations that she made decisions despite a conflict of interest and she improperly used her influence to profit her husband.
“Walensky, who took over as director with Biden’s inauguration, is married to Loren D. Walensky, a renowned pediatric oncology researcher at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard,” Dr. Scott Hounsell of RedState revealed. “In October 2019 Loren Walensky became the scientific co-founder and a member of the Board of Directors of Lytica Therapeutics, “an early-stage biotechnology company working on an innovative platform for developing next-generation antimicrobials.”
“Just four months later, Walensky’s Lytica received a $16.9 million dollar HHS grant to ‘develop antibacterial peptides with broad activity against multidrug-resistant bacteria’,” he added.
Further ethical questions loom over her tenure as CDC Director. Emails reveal that the agency coordinated with teacher’s unions to make politically influenced decisions over masking in schools.
Walensky once touted that Covid-19 vaccines stop people from being infected with the virus, which was proven to be false.
She later reversed herself on this claim, which was a foundational assumption for Covid-19 vaccine mandates.
“Our vaccines are working exceptionally well,” Walensky said in August 2021. “They continue to work well for Delta with regard to severe illness and death, they prevent it. But what they can’t do anymore is prevent transmission.”
Walensky was also untruthful in July 2021 when she said there would be “no federal mandate.”
“To clarify: There will be no nationwide mandate. I was referring to mandates by private institutions and portions of the federal government,” Walensky wrote in a Twitter post. “There will be no federal mandate.”
In an interview at her alma mater at the Washington University School of Medicine at St. Louis in 2022, she admitted that mistakes were made during the Covid pandemic.
“Nobody said ‘waning’ when this vaccine is going to work, ‘oh well maybe it’ll wear off.’ Nobody said ‘well, what if…it’s not as potent against the next variant,’” she claimed. “I have frequently said ‘we’re going to lead with the science’…I think public heard that as ‘science is foolproof. Science is black and white.’…The truth is science is grey. And science is not always immediate.”
Walensky also admitted that she got the talking point that the Covid-19 vaccines were “95% effective” via CNN.
“I can tell you where I was when the CNN feed came that it was 95% effective — the vaccine. So many of us wanted to be helpful. So many of us wanted to say, ‘okay, this is our ticket out right now.’ We’re done. So, I think we had perhaps too little caution and too much optimism for some good things that came our way. I really do.”
The U.S. public health emergency declaration will expire soon, and COVID-19 no longer qualifies as a global emergency, according to the World Health Organization. With a budget of $12 billion and more than 12,000 employees, the CDC will need to navigate the next stage of its pandemic responses without Walensky.
Here is what Americans can expect next from Walensky: Landing on her feet in a cushy job with Big Pharma or an industry associated position cashing in on her disastrous tenure as CDC director.