Rochelle Walensky is stepping down as the head of the Centers for Disease Control after a rocky tenure overseeing the Biden administration's response to the pandemic.
Walensky has been in the role since Biden's first day in office and will depart in June, weeks after the pandemic emergency orders lapse. "The end of the COVID-19 public health emergency marks a tremendous transition for our country, for public health, and in my tenure as CDC Director," Walensky said in a letter to President Joe Biden announcing her resignation.
Walensky received criticism for her response to the pandemic and the country’s reopening, the New York Post reported:
Walensky caught flak as leader of the CDC for having bungled the Biden administration’s COVID response on issues like school reopening, vaccination, and mask mandates.
The Post has exclusively revealed through documents provided by government watchdog Americans for Public Trust that Walensky’s CDC let the American Federation of Teachers suggest language for guidelines which kept schools closed for in-person learning months after studies showed children were at low risk of transmitting the virus in classes. ...
Walensky was also one of several members of the Biden administration who falsely claimed in 2021 that those who received the COVID vaccine couldn’t spread the virus.
The CDC director walked back that claim days later, admitting that "the evidence isn’t clear" and that she was "speaking broadly."
The agency in the same year also removed mask mandates only to reintroduce them months later.
During her tenure, Walensky advocated against the "serious public health threat" of racism.
"Yet, the disparities seen over the past year were not a result of COVID-19," she wrote in 2021. "Instead, the pandemic illuminated inequities that have existed for generations and revealed for all of America a known, but often unaddressed, epidemic impacting public health: racism."