Dr. Rochelle Walensky Has the Nerve to Warn Americans About ‘Politicized Science’ [Video]

Dr. Rochelle Walensky Has the Nerve to Warn Americans About ‘Politicized Science’

Walensky, in an about-face, now says that she wants Americans to make health decisions based on “their own risk assessment” … “not through politics.”

BECKER NEWS

Dr. Rochelle Walensky has an important message for the citizens of the United States upon leaving after a disastrous tenure as head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Stay vigilant about “misinformation” and “avoid the politicization of science.”

No, seriously.

In one of her last discussions as the CDC’s chief, she emphasized in an interview to The Wall Street Journal the importance of making health decisions guided by individual risk assessments and personal risk factors, not influenced by politics.

Walensky now says that she wants Americans to make health decisions based on “their own risk assessment and their own personal risks, but not through politics.”

This is an about-face from the CDC’s one-size-fits all guidance issued during the Covid pandemic, which saw the agency advocate for novel mRNA vaccines for all age groups, regardless of natural immunity antibodies or health profiles. Indeed, advanced analysis shows that Covid was never more dangerous to young people than the seasonal flu, yet the CDC continued to push the vaccines for those as young as 6 months old, even going so far as to recommend it for the childhood vaccination schedule, despite known serious adverse events like heart inflammation.

Such questionable decision-making left the agency open to accusations that it was padding the profits of Big Pharma at the expense of prudent medical science. This alleged “regulatory capture” led to a collapse of trust among Americans. This increasingly prevalent view that the CDC was compromised was exacerbated when emails emerged showing that the CDC had coordinated with teacher’s unions to make scientifically dubious mask recommendations for young children.

The CDC’s guidance under Dr. Walensky was marked by decision-making that flew in the face of caution and medical science; it thus appears that upon reflection that a patient-centered approach that takes into consideration that multiple factors that a physician should consider when assessing a patient’s risk profile was the right one all along. Who would’ve thunk it.

This isn’t Walensky’s first mea culpa. In a March 2022 address to her alma mater the Washington University School of Medicine at St. Louis, she discussed the “lessons learned” from the Covid pandemic in a frank and humble manner.

One of the most striking moments is when the CDC director effectively confesses that the agency is not the final authority on “the science.”

“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.”

This is the CDC Director driving a stake through the “science is settled” narrative. However, her agency engaged in the “pre-bunking” of medical “misinformation,” as she confessed in the recent WSJ interview.

This “pre-bunking” has led to embarrassments for the CDC when it has gotten the science wrong, even in the face of medical experts counseling opposite guidance. One such example was admitted when Dr. Walensky admitted the Covid vaccines waned in efficacy; however, at the same time, the agency neglected the robust and longer-lasting protection offered by natural immunity.

The CDC and other health authorities also consistently misled the public throughout the pandemic by stating or implying that the Covid vaccines stopped or significantly slowed the spread, when the truth was that the pharmaceutical companies allegedly did not even test for this immunological property, nor was there any substantial evidence to support the false claim.

Dr. Walensky’s term as the CDC director was thus marked by political divisions. Red states tended to resist the agency’s advice on quarantine measures, social distancing, and face masks during the pandemic more than their blue state counterparts. In red states that ignored the CDC and the advice of other public health officials like Dr. Anthony Fauci, when corrected for health factors like age and obesity rates, the results turned out to be comparably negligible with blue states that imposed harsh lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccine mandates for public workers. Many Americans, rightly, viewed the blue states’ draconian measures as a violation of their constitutional rights and an abuse of emergency powers by blue state governors and legislatures.

However, Walensky said in the interview that public health shouldn’t fall along partisan lines.

“Some of our biggest divides were based on jurisdictions and how they voted,” Walensky remarked about Covid-19 vaccination rates.

However, Democrats demonstrated a higher propensity for vaccination than Republicans, as polling data revealed. The political split emerged as a significant determinant of Covid-19 vaccination rates, even more so than other demographic factors, as stated by KFF, previously known as the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Castrucci, president and chief executive officer of the de Beaumont Foundation, a nonpartisan, philanthropic organization focused on public health, pointed out to the WSJ that the CDC is inherently political because its director is chosen by the president.

At the same time, he said, it was an easy scapegoat for political leaders during the pandemic because it was a relatively unknown entity to Americans.

“It was this nameless, faceless agency to the public,” he remarked. 

Prior to the pandemic, the CDC mainly functioned as an advisor to state and local health authorities, provided grants, and published scientific research and data. However, the pandemic pushed the CDC into a new public-facing role, Castrucci pointed out.

Before leaving her position in June, which caught some off-guard, Dr. Walensky focused on improving the CDC’s data collection infrastructure and advocated for additional resources and authority to mandate data collection from states.

In an embarrassing moment in her final Congressional testimony as CDC Director, she admitted that the agency lacked state-level data to justify making the sweeping public health pronouncements it was issuing to the nation.

“At a national level we have never been able to get hospitalization, vaccination, and COVID [data]… We did not get data in aggregate on vaccination and hospitalizations. All that data that you are filling out in the EHR does not translate into public health data,’ she confessed.

Dr. Mandy Cohen, the former North Carolina health secretary, is set to succeed her. As for her next steps, Walensky intends to spend more time with her family and consider her future endeavors. She warned that despite improvements, the U.S. is still underprepared for another pandemic, advocating for increased funding and better infrastructure in public health.

“It’s been raining infectious diseases since the day I got here,” she said. “We’re better than we were, and we’re not where we need to be.”

The American people could object that it’s been raining bad decisions from the CDC during each one of its pandemic responses. The only umbrella we’ve got is the Constitution. It’s best we cling to it or we’ll all wind up getting soaking wet.

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(TLB) published this article from Becker News as compiled and written by Kyle Becker

Header featured image (edited) credit: Walensky/org. BN article

Emphasis added by (TLB)

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