Former CDC Director Admits Agency Never Even Considered Key COVID Vaccine Issues

The CDC has been in the news recently, as Trump administration officials work to clean house at the once-respected public health agency. And cleaning house is much-needed and well-deserved.

It bears repeating that the CDC's list of mistakes during the pandemic could fill a book. And has. 

They flip-flopped on masks because of an article in the New York Times written by an unqualified sociologist. Collaborated with teachers unions out of shared political ideology to ensure that schools stayed closed. Used a phone survey to make a graphic saying that masks protected people from COVID, even though that graphic showed a non-statistically significant result.

Then there's the COVID vaccines. 

Then CDC-director Rochelle Walensky told the public that the vaccines were essentially 100 percent effective, that those who took them did not get sick and did not transmit the virus. Corporations used that comment to institute vaccine mandates. Politicians used it to create vaccine passport systems that discriminated against unvaccinated people. Social media companies censored anyone who criticized her or pointed out her claims were not visible in the data. 

And now she's admitted that the entire agency essentially never considered the possibility that they were wrong.

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, answers questions at a Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee hearing on Capitol Hill on January 11, 2022 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Greg Nash-Pool/Getty Images)

Rochelle Walensky Admits CDC Was A Disaster During COVID

Walensky in a discussion about the CDC's handling of COVID admitted that the agency did in fact, make some mistakes. Especially around its optimism on COVID vaccine efficacy.

"I can tell you where I was when that CNN feed came that it was 95% effective, so many of us wanted it to be helpful, so many of us wanted to say, ‘ok, this is our ticket out,’ right, now we're done," Walensky said. "So I think we had perhaps too little caution and too much optimism [about the COVID vaccine] …I think all of us wanted this to be done. Nobody said waning, ‘Oh, this vaccine is going to work,' or well, maybe it will wear off.’ Nobody said 'what if it's not as potent against the next variant.'"

So the nation's leading public health agency just…never considered the possibility that the vaccine might decline in efficacy with time? They never considered the possibility that new variants might lessen its efficacy? And what that might mean for the spread of COVID, for how it might change messaging or policy? 

The CDC discredited itself thoroughly with its actions, claims, scientific misconduct, and open political activism. But not considering what vaccine waning, or new variants, both well-understood phenomenons, would mean for the mRNA vaccines? That's beyond discrediting, it's dangerous.

Dangerous how? Well, the CDC's incredible, inexcusable lack of foresight led to vaccine mandates directed at young, healthy, college-aged males. Almost every university across the country, eager to display their commitment to the "correct" ideology, enacted vaccine mandates for students returning to campuses in the fall of 2021. Those students were at little-to-no risk of serious illness from COVID itself, but as has been well-established, young adult men are at an elevated risk of myocarditis as a side effect of COVID vaccination.

So the CDC failed to consider the probability that vaccine efficacy would wane or vanish by late 2021 as new variants took over and never corrected its mistake publicly after it became obvious it was wrong, and mandates forced healthy young men into getting a vaccine they didn't need and likely didn't want. Who knows how many were affected by myocarditis or other side effects unnecessarily? 

That's just one of a million negative outcomes that resulted from the CDC's spectacular incompetence. How many patients were denied medical care, or shunted to the back of the line for transplants or other procedures because they were unvaccinated? Even though the efficacy for those vaccinated individuals ahead of them might have already eroded to virtually nothing.

How many parents got their young children vaccinated based on the CDC's advice, not knowing that the agency giving them recommendations never considered the fact that it was obviously nowhere close to the initial efficacy claims?

Like so many other things the CDC did, the list of harms from its disastrous, sometimes purposeful failings is endless. And this is the agency that the media has had a meltdown about reforming. Even reform might not even be enough to fix the institutional disaster that is the CDC.