Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, will step down from her position on June 30, she announced Friday. -19 pandemic, the greatest threat to American well-being in decades.
Her departure comes as the administration faces major vacancies in its Covid-19 response team. Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House Covid-19 coordinator, plans to leave his post this month, along with other key officials, including Dr. Nahid Bhadelia, a White House adviser on global response. A new White House pandemic office has no leader or staff.
The government plans to end the public health emergency on May 11 and shut down major programs — such as access to free tests — that had helped Americans through the worst days of the pandemic.
But the virus has not disappeared. It still kills about 1,000 Americans a week and more are hospitalized. The leadership vacuum comes at a precarious time.
At an agency-wide meeting, Dr. Walensky admitted to having mixed feelings about her decision and burst into tears, according to people who had been on a conference call with her.
“I took on this role with the goal of putting the dark days of the pandemic behind me and moving the CDC — and public health — to a much better and more trusted place,” she said in a subsequent email to the office staff.
Dr. Walensky did not respond to a request for comment. Senior government officials and outside experts have said Dr. Walensky struggled with an unwieldy leadership structure at the Department of Health and Human Services, of which the CDC is a part. The agency’s relationship with the White House was tense at times, as its advice to the public sometimes seemed confusing or contradictory.
A person familiar with her mindset said that Dr. Walensky was also tired of harassment from members of the public unhappy with pandemic restrictions and of the long commute between the CDC’s Atlanta offices and her Massachusetts home.
Andy Slavitt, a senior adviser to the White House’s 2021 Covid-19 team, praised Dr. Walensky to do work “that is easy to criticize and hard to do”.
“You show up in an emergency with a specific job to do,” he added. “It is almost a mission, with a beginning and an end. Even though she ran a bureau, running a bureau in wartime is different from running a bureau in peacetime.
Public health experts said the news came as a surprise, with some disappointed to see her go.
“I think it’s a loss to the CDC and to the nation,” said Dr. Megan Ranney, the deputy dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health. “I know it hasn’t been easy, not just because of Covid, but because of the politicization of science.”
Dr. Ranney said she had received hate mail and personal attacks, but what she experienced was “just the tip of the iceberg” compared to how Dr. Walensky had been treated.
Dr. Celine Gounder, a former adviser to the Biden administration who helped Dr. Walensky since 2004, said, “Her departure indicates to me that the CDC is more fractured and that the federal government’s commitment to public health is even weaker than I had been. thought.”
Dr. Walensky grew up in Potomac, Maryland, in a family of respected scientists. She trained in medicine at Johns Hopkins University and joined the Harvard faculty in 2001, where she built a reputation as a meticulous researcher and generous mentor.
Prior to her tenure as CDC director, Dr. Walensky entered the infectious disease ward at Massachusetts General Hospital, where she saw the devastation of the pandemic firsthand. She was known for her work in health care policy, particularly on HIV
But with little government experience and leading large institutions, Dr. Walensky made an unexpected choice to head an agency with a staff of about 11,000 people.
Dr. Walensky took over the beleaguered agency in January 2021. She had an almost impossible task ahead of her: to restore the reputation of the once-legendary CDC as public trust in the agency, and science more broadly, was rapidly ebbing away.
The CDC has been pilloried since the beginning of the pandemic for testing missteps, changing guidance on masking, and outdated surveillance and data systems. Trump administration officials harassed agency leaders, rewrote the guidelines and interfered with the investigative reports, undermining scientists’ morale even as the crisis gathered momentum.
“She insisted that people act faster and more focused, so she pushed people to maybe do things a little bit differently than they had been doing,” said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease physician at Vanderbilt University who works closely with the agency .
“Moral within the CDC has clearly improved under her leadership,” he added.
But the pandemic proved to be tough terrain, even for someone as respected and loved as Dr. Walensky. She was roundly criticized by experts for advising people to stop wearing their masks just weeks before the Delta strain of the coronavirus ravaged the country.
And after she slashed insulation requirements even as the Omicron variant brought the country to a standstill, she was accused of letting economic interests outweigh scientific prudence.
Anne Sosin, who studies health equity at Dartmouth, said Dr. Walensky had sometimes taken the blame for decisions made by the Biden administration, but that she could also have done more to align with the public on the rationale for those decisions.
Still, Ms Sosin added: “It has sometimes appeared from the outside that Dr Walensky lacked the courage to say no to decisions that really undermined public health.”
Republicans in Congress repeatedly called for her resignation and portrayed the agency as a failed institution during hearings on the pandemic. But some experts felt that Dr. Walensky had done her best with an impossible hand.
“The public – and even health professionals – wanted consistency in messaging and messaging that wasn’t possible because Covid has just never been a static threat,” said Dr. Jeremy Faust, an emergency medicine physician and health policy expert at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
Dr. Daniel Pollock, who led Covid surveillance for a few months in 2020 and retired in November 2021 after 37 years with the agency, said: “The timing of this leadership change is deeply problematic. I worked at CDC under 10 different directors, and when they leave abruptly, for whatever reason, the ripple effects take a big toll.
It was not immediately clear who would lead the GGD after the departure of Dr. Walensky. Some scientists said that Dr. Walensky should be a public health generalist attuned to social problems and how to run a major federal agency, not a physician-scientist like Dr. Walensky.
“This has to be a public health person,” said Katelyn Jetelina, an epidemiologist who writes a popular newsletter and has advised the CDC for the past year. “We’re thinking about treating millions of people at once, rather than this initial training of one-on-one physician care.”
Despite the controversy surrounding her tenure, Dr. Walensky’s email to employees on Friday that she believed she had improved the agency’s reputation.
“We jointly moved CDC forward, reorganized the agency and began the necessary work to orient the company on public health action and to promote accountability, timeliness and transparency in our work,” she said.
During her time at the CDC, Dr. Walensky, the agency has administered more than 670 million Covid vaccine doses and provided advice on immunization, social distancing and masking that “protected the country and the world from the greatest infectious disease threat we have seen in more than 100 years.”
Dr. Walensky last year acknowledged the agency’s shortcomings and pledged to reorganize it, which would allow it to respond more quickly to public health crises. Some organizational changes have been announced, but it’s unclear whether any of these have made a material difference to the CDC’s work.
Among other changes, Dr. Walensky in creating an office that is more organized and empowered to work with state and local health developments, said Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, vice dean for public health practices and community engagement at Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Health.
“It allows the agency to have a vision of how the country’s very complicated public health system holds together,” he said. “One of the director’s jobs will be to take and use the structure that Dr. Walensky left behind.”
Under her leadership, Dr. Walensky in her email to employees, the agency has strengthened its public health infrastructure and secured hundreds of millions of dollars to modernize the country’s data infrastructure.
She also stated that racism is a serious public health threat, she noted, and led the agency in its efforts to contain a multinational MPOX outbreak and the spread of Ebola in Uganda.
“We’ve made this world a safer place,” said Dr. Walensky. “I’ve never been so proud of anything I’ve done in my professional career.”
Emily Anthes, Sharon LaFraniere And Benjamin Muller reporting contributed.