Some days, the columns just write themselves.
Just when you thought the absurdity at America’s health care agencies was finally cresting, with the bulk of people responsible for the politicization and weaponization of science leading to disastrous COVID policy either retiring or being let go, along comes word this past week that former NAIAD director, Dr. Anthony Fauci, got rewarded instead of indicted for his role in funding gain of function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the same place that gave us weaponized novel Coronavirus-19. Instead of spending his retirement in the Graybar Hotel, the octogenarian gets a more lucrative soft landing from government service – teaching the next generation of medical students “the science” at Georgetown.
Dr. Francis Collins, after retiring from the National Institute of Health, avoids any oversight scrutiny after he lied his way through the pandemic by now serving at the pleasure of the President as the science advisor in the White House. He should have been indicted for his singing and guitar playing alone.
Completing the trifecta is the news that the outgoing director of the Center for Disease Control, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, is tragically not going away quietly into retirement. As the Wall Street Journal reports, she’s got a message for you and me on her way out the door – beware of misinformation.
From the Journal’s report, Dr. Walensky is leaving behind a plan for the nation’s health care agency to reestablish its credibility that she oversaw being reduced to tatters.
Walensky contends that the CDC has a plan that would help it regain trust and forestall misinformation by taking a defensive approach to public-health messaging. That includes brainstorming potential avenues of misinformation before releasing public-health reports, and making clear to media outlets what details could be misconstrued, she said. It is a process Walensky calls “prebunking.”
Note that nowhere in here is actual science being reported, testing of hypotheses, removing political appointees that oversee grants from being in charge of policy, or any measure of transparency at all. Nope. According to Dr. Walensky, everything would just be spectacular if media would be totally on board with not only the talking points, but how to knock down any scientific pushback against the narrative. Yeah, that’s how to restore credibility – remove the science entirely from the process, and take away any intellectual curiosity from public discussion at all. I’m sure that will do the trick.
As for the misinformation caution, let’s briefly take it from the top, shall we? And just to keep things fair, we’ll focus the misinformation during her time as CDC director.
Dr. Walensky in late March of 2021 proclaimed that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, do not spread the virus, and can’t get sick. She claimed that this information was not just from clinical trials, but from real world data. There simply was no real world data from the vaccines coming in by that point. She was spreading misinformation more virally than COVID at that point.
Dr. Walensky testified under oath to Congress in May of 2021, two months later, that even if you’re vaccinated and get COVID, you can’t give it to anyone else, and that the data she didn’t actually provide to Congress backed her up. Keep in mind, in two months, with overwhelming real world data, she went from claiming on TV you can’t get infected if you’re vaccinated to you can’t transmit the virus if you get it ever after being vaccinated. Why the change? Because people who were vaccinated were getting the virus. A lot.
In May of 2021, Walensky began her scaremongering to get young children vaccinated, not disclosing the side effects, largely to young males, of myocarditis. Children from the words bat soup were never a high-risk group for severe injury or death. They just weren’t. Real world data showed that right away. The people that were dying from COVID in vast majorities were people who were elderly or with co-morbidities. If you were 100 pounds overweight, had gray hair, and smoked like a chimney, you probably died of COVID. Teenagers? Not so much. And we all knew that at the time. Dr. Walensky wanted the shot given to adolescents when there was none, zero, data to show the necessity of that. In fact, the statistical data overwhelmingly showed the opposite of what Walensky was seeking.
By mid-2022, Walensky hadn’t gotten off of her ‘shots for kids’ riff, claiming false data that COVID was a top five kill risk for kids. It was proven to be a nonsense claim, but the vaccine was approved for use in kids, and there were consequences, as the testing data now shows, and we’ll continue to see as a lost generation of kids desperately try to play catch-up.
Walensky was pushed about myocarditis in young males who were vaccinated and boosted, and she refused to accept that it was a factor. Real world data has shown that not to be true, that it was indeed, and remains, a factor.
Walensky was one of the early ‘masks work’ people. They didn’t. Never did. Everyone honestly knows that. The virus is a millionth the size of the gaps in the fibers of the cloth. Kids never wore masks right, nor was it reasonable to expect they would be able to. Masking outdoors was always nonsense, and yet Walensky tried to claim false data that masks were essential.
Rather than following scientific guidelines as to when to sanction the reopening of schools, which in retrospect should have never shut down, she outsourced the policy making of the guidelines not to any scientific body within her agency, but to Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers. A Union representing whether or not teachers wanted to go back to in-person instruction or not dictated the status, not the scientific pros and cons behind the decision making. She played politics with the science and got caught red-handed when the emails leaked.
There is a terrific compilation video of testimony and interviews Dr. Walensky has given in her time as director of CDC here.
Outstanding video compiling all the lies told by Rochelle Walensky regarding COVID throughout her tenure as CDC Director.pic.twitter.com/oyq72GQN1L
— Michael P Senger (@michaelpsenger) May 6, 2023
For her to now say we should guard ourselves against misinformation, consider that caution heeded with at least half the country. Less than half the country believes the FDA, CDC, NIH, NAIAD. Thanks to Attorney General Merrick Garland, less than half the country believes anything out of the DOJ or the FBI. Thanks to Alejandro Mayorkas, less than half the country believes anything out of Homeland Security or Border Patrol.
The next president has an uphill battle to begin to restore confidence in any number of institutions of the federal government that have been destroyed. That credibility won’t be restored overnight. Nor will it be restored in a year or two. It’ll take at least a generation of proven reform and transparency before anything resembling a majority trusts the agencies again. God help us if something worse than COVID comes along in the meantime.
