CDC Director Rochelle Walensky says she will step down in June
Walensky sent a resignation letter to President Biden and announced the decision at a CDC staff meeting and her last day will be June 30.
Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, submitted her resignation Friday, saying the waning of the COVID-19 pandemic was a good time to make a transition.
Walensky’s last day will be June 30, CDC officials said, and an interim director wasn’t immediately named. She sent a resignation letter to President Biden and announced the decision at a CDC staff meeting.
Walensky, 54, has been the agency’s director for a little over two years. In her letter to Biden, she expressed “mixed feelings” about the decision and didn’t say exactly why she was stepping down, but said the nation is at a moment of transition as emergency declarations come to an end. “I have never been prouder of anything I have done in my professional career,” she wrote.
The World Health Organization said Friday that COVID-19 no longer qualifies as a global emergency, and the U.S. public health emergency declaration will expire next week. Deaths in the U.S. are at their lowest point since the earliest days of the coronavirus outbreak in early 2020.
The WHO said that even though the emergency phase of COVID-19 is over, the pandemic hasn’t come to an end, noting recent spikes in cases in some regions.
The CDC, with a $12-billion budget and more than 12,000 employees, is an Atlanta-based federal agency tasked with protecting Americans from disease outbreaks and other public health threats.
Walensky, previously an infectious diseases specialist at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, had no experience running a government health agency when she was sworn in on the first day of the Biden administration.
She came with a reputation as a prominent voice on the pandemic, sometimes criticizing certain aspects of how the government was responding. She was brought in to raise morale at the CDC, to rebuild public trust in the agency and to improve its sometimes-bumbling response to the pandemic.
At the time of her arrival, more than 400,000 U.S. COVID-19 deaths had been reported, and states were scrambling to get supplies of new vaccines. Morale at the CDC was abysmal. The Trump administration had marginalized the agency, with the White House taking over the government’s messaging about the pandemic and sometimes opposing or undermining what the CDC wanted to do.
With the nation’s COVID-19 public health emergency ending and less state cooperation, the CDC has a new plan for monitoring the coronavirus across the U.S.
“No CDC director in history inherited the set of challenges she faced coming into the job,” said Jason Schwartz, a health policy expert at the Yale School of Public Health.
The CDC regained prominence in government messaging — although even under Biden, the White House remained at center stage in the handling of the response, Schwartz said.
Walensky leaves at a time when the U.S. COVID-19 death toll stands at about 1.1 million. Reported cases, hospitalizations and deaths have all been trending down for months.
At CDC, Walensky started a center for forecasting and outbreak analytics and took steps to modernize data collection and analysis. Last year, she began a reorganization designed to make the agency more nimble and to improve its communications with the public.
Infectious disease control may be in CDC’s DNA, but the agency’s capabilities have not evolved to keep up with the faster speed and higher stakes of germs in the modern world.
Biden, in a statement, said Walensky “leaves CDC a stronger institution, better positioned to confront health threats and protect Americans.”
White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients applauded her performance.
“Her creativity, skill and expertise, and pure grit were essential to our effective response and an historic recovery that made life better for Americans across the country,” Zients, formerly Biden’s COVID response coordinator, said in a statement.
There were stumbles during her tenure too.
In the spring of 2021, Walensky said fully vaccinated people could stop wearing masks in many settings, only to reverse course as the then-new Delta variant spread. And that December, the agency’s decision to shorten isolation and quarantine caught many by surprise and caused confusion.
A federal rule requiring insurers to reimburse policyholders for up to eight at-home COVID tests per month ends Thursday. But in California, state lawmakers have taken steps to avoid that.
Also, Walensky and other U.S. officials were criticized last year for not being aggressive enough against an emerging mpox outbreak that faded in the late summer and fall.
Jennifer Nuzzo, a pandemic expert at the Brown University School of Public Health, is worried that the proposed reforms won’t happen without Walensky there to drive them.
“CDC is exhausted. They have been working around the clock, nonstop, for three years with little gratitude,” she said. “To have a leadership change in the midst of all that ... I can’t imagine that doesn’t take the wind out of the sails of change.”
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