WASHINGTON — Two days before Christmas, with the Omicron variant driving a near-vertical rise in new coronavirus cases, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention alerted the White House that she planned to recommend that people infected with the virus isolate for five days instead of 10.The director, Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, had faced previous criticism for issuing recommendations that confused the public and in some cases caught the White House off guard. Determined to avoid that this time, she briefed other top Biden health officials on her proposal so they would all be on the same page, according to two people familiar with her actions.It did not work out that way. Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, and Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, the surgeon general, were concerned that the new guidance did not urge people to get a negative Covid test before ending their isolation. After the new recommendation became public, they both took issue with it on national television, saying they expected the C.D.C. to clarify its advice.On Wednesday, nine days after the guidance was issued and a day after it was slightly modified to include some advice on testing, the C.D.C. was still having a hard time explaining itself. “How do you expect people to keep track of what they can and can’t do?” a CNN reporter demanded of Dr. Walensky at a White House briefing.It was a familiar refrain.President Biden came into office vowing to restore public trust in the C.D.C. after the Trump White House had tied the agency’s hands and manipulated its scientific judgments on the pandemic for political ends. Yet in his first year of battling the coronavirus, Mr. Biden has presided over a series of messaging failures that have followed a familiar pattern, with Dr. Walensky and her team making what experts say are largely sound decisions, but fumbling in communicating them to America.Dr. Walensky, a highly regarded infectious disease expert from Boston with no prior government experience, insisted in February that schools must keep students six feet apart; in March, she said three feet was enough. She said in February that teachers did not need to be vaccinated to reopen schools; the White House said the next day that she was speaking “in her personal capacity.”In May, she said that vaccinated people generally did not need to wear masks in public, a sudden change that flummoxed state health officials. Two months later, she reversed that guidance after it was shown that vaccinated people could still transmit the virus.With the virus throwing one curveball after another, changing advice from the C.D.C. is a given. But Dr. Walensky’s critics say the C.D.C.’s recommendations are sometimes so confusing or abruptly modified that they seem more like drafts than fully vetted proclamations.“I don’t think that the C.D.C. guidelines were significantly wrong,” Dr. Tom Frieden, the agency’s director under former President Barack Obama, said of the latest recommendations on isolation for those with Covid. But he added, “I think the way they were released was very problematic.”The crux of the problem, several administration officials said, is a failure by the C.D.C. and the Biden administration’s messaging experts to work in concert. Who is to blame for that is a matter of debate. Dr. Walensky’s critics say she is not collaborative enough, too often springing decisions on other federal officials who then struggle to defend them in public. Her defenders say she strives to coordinate, but that it is not her job to ensure consensus across the entire administration.Some suggest the White House has gone too far in its hands-off, let-the-scientists-rule approach, leaving a vacuum of leadership and forcing ad-hoc coordination between the various public health agencies. That has been exacerbated by a health secretary, Xavier Becerra, who receives routine briefings from scientists but does not settle interagency disputes about the pandemic response.Dr. Fauci, the administration’s best-known spokesman on the pandemic, has further muddied the waters at times, publicly contradicting the C.D.C. as he did this week or making statements he has later walked back.He said in late December, for instance, that a vaccination requirement for domestic airline passengers should be seriously considered, leaving the White House to field a flurry of questions on a policy it was not prepared to recommend. Later, he said a mandate was unlikely.On Wednesday, Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said it was OK for the C.D.C. to modify its guidance, adding that, for one thing, “if they hadn’t changed their recommendations over the course of time, schools would probably be closed across the country.”But even some within Dr. Walensky’s own agencyBy: Sharon LaFraniere, Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Noah Weiland
Title: For C.D.C.’s Walensky, a Steep Learning Curve on Messaging
Sourced From: www.nytimes.com/2022/01/05/us/politics/cdc-walensky-covid-isolation-testing.html
Published Date: Thu, 06 Jan 2022 00:11:34 +0000
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