CDC Director Acknowledges Poor COVID Response, Launches Agency Overhaul

The CDC has done a poor job responding to COVID-19 and will make major changes to its operations, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, MD, MPH, said Wednesday.

“For 75 years, CDC and public health have been preparing for COVID-19, and in our big moment, our performance did not reliably meet expectations,” Walensky said in a statement. “As a long-time admirer of this agency and a champion for public health, I want us all to do better and it starts with CDC leading the way. My goal is a new, public health action-oriented culture at CDC that emphasizes accountability, collaboration, communication, and timeliness. I look forward to working with the incredible people at CDC and our partners to realize the agency’s fullest potential to benefit the health and well-being of all Americans.”

“In April, I launched an effort to refine and modernize CDC structures, systems, and processes around developing and deploying our science and programs,” Walensky said in an email to colleagues on Wednesday morning. “The goal was to learn how to pivot our long-standing practices and adapt to pandemics and other public health emergencies, then to apply those lessons across the organization.”

“The effort included a review of key workflows, with a particular focus on how we swiftly move from science and program to policy, so that we can promptly operationalize guidance for the public,” she continued. The review Walensky mentioned was conducted by James Macrae, MA, MPP, associate administrator of the Bureau of Primary Health Care at the Health Resources and Services Administration.

Walensky and the CDC were criticized for their poor public response to the pandemic, and more recently came under fire for the agency’s response to monkeypox.

“For CDC to be more effective, we must build on the lessons learned from COVID-19 to improve how we deliver our science and programs,” Walensky continued, noting that this includes sharing scientific findings and data faster, as well as “translating science into practical, easy-to-understand policy.”

To accomplish these goals, “there are some areas that will require a reorganization,” she said. These include “creating a new, agency-wide-focused equity office in the Office of the Director, moving both OLSS [the Office of Laboratory Science and Safety] and OS [the Office of Science] back to the Office of the Director, and establishing a new, senior executive position for global health in the Office of the Director. In addition, I will continue to gather feedback from agency leadership to develop and submit a reorganization package later this year.”

“We will work together to change systems, processes, governance, and the structure of CDC to build an agency that values and rewards public health action,” Walensky wrote in the email. “None of these challenges happened overnight, and our work ahead for improvement will take time.”

“I am leaning on every one of you to accomplish the hard work of transforming CDC for the better, and I look forward to our collective efforts to position our agency and the public health community for greatest success in the future,” she concluded.