Four-Day Nationwide Strike Over Vaccine Mandates Starts

 by Enrico Trigoso via The Epoch Times,

A massive, nationwide strike against vaccine mandates will take place from Nov. 8 to Nov. 11, according to the main organizer for the walkout, Leigh Dundas, a human rights attorney and public speaker.

The event will kick off in Los Angeles on Monday. The locations of the marches have not yet been disclosed.

The walkouts involve people from various industries such as trucking and telecom. Air and rail transport workers are not federally allowed to go on strike due to a law passed in 1926 named the Railway Labor Act, but some plan to protest anonymously.

“The Golden Gate Bridge Rally is going to be an epic and unprecedented moment in time. It will mark—on Veterans’ Day evening—a 4-day Nationwide walkout, by rank and file workers everywhere, from blue-collar to white-collar, black, white, yellow, red, every faith, every creed, who are uniquely united despite their differences on one common truth: that vaccine mandates have no place in a truly free society,” Dundas told The Epoch Times.

“Every group: anti-vaccine, BLM, gay, straight, Jewish, Muslim, Native American, Asian, Latino, Christian, atheist—all groups—are coming together for this one historic moment in time—to trumpet not just to our own government, but indeed to the watching eyes of the world, that vaccine mandates will no longer be tolerated. That in this country, WE are the government, because our founding fathers knew this truth: a truly free nation is a nation of the people, by the people, and for the people. That we are the leaders we have been waiting for. And that today marks the day that we retire vaccine mandates as a concept that cannot live in a free society, and that we are, indeed, simply that: a free society.”

Leigh Dundas (Photo provided by Nationwide Walkout to The Epoch Times)

The Epoch Times talked to some of these frustrated workers who will participate in the strike to see why they are doing it.

‘I Choose God’s Immunity’

Kristen Grace has been a Raytheon Systems Engineer for 18 years.

“I will lose my livelihood on December 8, because I won’t allow an experimental gene therapy to be injected into my bloodstream. I’ve recovered from COVID, and I work from home, but the government has claimed authority over my body and medical choices. I choose natural (God’s) immunity over government,” Grace said.

Brandon Childs has been serving for 7 years in the Air Force, 5 years in active duty and 2 years with the Arizona Air National Guard (ANG).

“I have stepped away from being ANG full time due to the mandate and I was promised by my civilian job that they would never require the vaccine.

“However as an army contractor that changed within the last month. I’ve lost 3 family members in the last year one being my father a week ago. I’ve put in RE’s [religious exemptions] at both and was told that the chances of being accepted are extremely dismal and I will face what looks like a general or dishonorable discharge (with a clean military record) from one and termination for the other. Affecting the benefits I have worked for and bled for the country I love.”

Another systems engineer that has been working for Raytheon for 25 years told The Epoch Times: “I’ve submitted a Notification of Religious Accommodation. If it’s not approved, I’ll be fired on December 8th because I’m not going to violate my beliefs or surrender my Constitutional rights for a job. Honestly, this is the most stressful year of my professional life. I’ve lost many nights of sleep. Even if approved I’ll likely continue to look for a new job.

“I feel betrayed by a company I’ve given my best years. They could have stood up for us but they put profits and the ‘woke’ agenda first. I’m surrounded by fully vaccinated people with new and mysterious health issues, many have gotten COVID, but I’m treated like someone unclean, less than. Science, logic, and common sense have been tossed in the COVID dumpster fire. While I love my country, I’m ashamed of my company and my government. The only good news is that even the fully vaccinated now realize the promise of normality was all a lie. Now they are once again masked and being told boosters will be mandatory. And they are now rising up too,” the engineer said.

Health Information Privacy

Christopher Burns, an attorney that works in Portsmouth New Hampshire, said: “For the first time in the history of the country the president and an entire political party seem to think it’s constitutionally appropriate to dictate to a private employer how to treat its private employees by requiring the employer to demand privately protected health information from the employee.”

Jet, a Honeywell employee, feels disappointed and is depressed about his company mandating the vaccine, which he is determined not to take due to his religious beliefs.

“I have so many feelings about this situation that it has gotten me into a state of depression. Never in a million years [had] I imagined that something like this would happen in the United States. This is what tyranny looks like and it’s not going to stop here. Equally disappointing is to see that Honeywell, along with the rest of major U.S. corporations have decided to go along and enable tyranny. I’m not getting the vaccine. I have applied for a religious exemption. If not granted, so be it. Because of this mandate, we’re now going to be treated as second-class citizens. In case people have forgotten, this is the definition of tyranny: cruel and unfair treatment by people with power over others.”

A consultant for Thomson Reuters who does not even work physically at the company is bewildered at why he should take the vaccine.

“I have been working [for Reuters for] 13 years and at least 3 consultants are 100 percent remote, 2,000 miles away from the office! They say because the company has government contracts that means I have to abide by the mandate too.

“How am I endangering anybody from my home?” the consultant asked.

John Knox is part of the LA Firefighters for Freedom.

“We are fighting against these unconstitutional mandates because anything that is repugnant to the constitution is illegal. These mandates clearly step outside the constitutional parameters. As firefighters and first responders we need to take a stand and we need to let the rest of America know we will fight and they can join us,” Knox said.

‘It Is Against Our Rights as Americans’

A Maine 3rd Grade School teacher thinks the COVID vaccines should not be mandated.

“People have the right to make the choices that work best for their families and for themselves. I feel it is against our rights as Americans. Why are we dying on this sword?” the teacher asked.

Amtrak’s vaccine mandate deadline is also on Dec 8, an employee told The Epoch Times about her situation under the condition of anonymity.

“Employees with religious exemptions are either 1. Denied with no explanation, or 2. ‘Approved’ for unpaid ‘personal leave,’ and not allowed to seek other work while on involuntary ‘personal leave.’  This ‘accommodation’ is exceptionally harsh and retaliatory, considering that medical exemption employees are permitted to continue work with weekly testing, including full customer contact workers such as conductors,” she said.

“Any employee not in compliance with the vax mandate will be charged with insubordination and terminated, per Amtrak repeated internal announcements.”

Eric Mallow, a railroader, said: “The longer we comply with their tyranny, the worse this will get! We were absolutely essential last year and now we are completely expendable. Standing up for the rights of Americans far outweighs the difficulty of leaving a company that sees me as an insignificant number.”

A secretary from Arizona told The Epoch Times that the mandates are a “total violation” of her freedom.

“Where does this end?  If they can force vaccines in our bodies and violate our will that way, where is the line drawn?  We need to fight back and not allow this,” the secretary said.

The Epoch Times reached out to Amtrak and Raytheon for comment.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/hundreds-thousands-go-four-day-nationwide-strike-over-vaccine-mandates

So Now Most Truck Drivers Will Be Exempt From Vaccine Mandates

 By Jazz Shaw of HotAir

That announcement from President Joe Biden about federal vaccine mandates that would affect nearly all workers in the private sector is about as solid as a slice of swiss cheese. Every time we think we’re getting our heads wrapped around it, more changes or exceptions seem to appear. The latest is being hailed by representatives of the trucking industry as “a huge victory” because the Department of Labor has now decided that most truckers will not fall under the mandate. And if they do, they will have the option of submitting weekly negative COVID tests instead of getting the shot if they wish. So what makes truck drivers so special? Read on and find out, but it’s probably not any of the obvious answers that might jump to mind. (Yahoo News)

Truckers hailed victory on Friday after Labor Secretary Marty Walsh said in an interview that most drivers will be exempt from President Biden’s vaccine and testing mandate, CNBC reported.

Walsh’s comments came in response to criticism from the trucking industry against a policy announced by The White House on Thursday that will require millions of workers to be fully vaccinated or get tested regularly. The new rules are set to come into effect on January 4.

The rule applies to the federal government workforce and anybody working for a company with more than 100 employees, The White House said.

If we were living in some sort of alternate reality where sane, sensible debates drive government policy, you could probably see how exempting long-haul truckers from any vaccine mandate would make sense. The vast majority of them drive by themselves, sitting alone in the cab of their truck. There’s usually nobody else there to infect or be infected by. The only thing stupider than making them get vaccinated would be to make them wear masks while driving.

Under the Labor Department’s announcement, that seems to be the reality they are dealing with. Not all truckers will be exempt. Those who drive with a partner in the cab or who have to regularly interact with other people while loading and unloading will still fall under the mandate. There’s no word about the waitresses at the truck stops they frequent, particularly if the joint has fewer than 100 employees.

Of course, that’s not the real reason for this exemption and I’m guessing that most people know this. We’re in the middle of a very severe supply chain crisis right now and it’s being almost entirely driven by a shortage of qualified truck drivers with CDLs. Goods are being tied up for weeks at our nation’s ports and at ground-based points of distribution. This is leading to higher prices and empty shelves, just as the holidays are approaching. Joe Biden doesn’t want to be seen as the cause of even one truck driver leaving the business at a time like that, so the truckers get a free pass.

Unfortunately for Uncle Joe, this is yet another political maneuver that highlights the uneven and nonsensical approach his administration has taken toward these vaccine mandates. There’s nothing about truckers that makes them magically resistant to the novel coronavirus. Despite the fact that most of them drive alone in their rigs as I mentioned above, they presumably finish their runs and go home to their families. They occasionally stop off to sleep in motels or to dine in roadhouses. They come in contact with plenty of people, albeit not so much while doing their job.

Also, as previously noted, even the truckers who are not exempt will be automatically given the option to submit weekly negative COVID tests. This is not an option currently being offered to most police, firefighters or other public servants. If weekly testing is good enough to “slow the spread” then it should be good enough for everyone and not just the politically favored, right?

This is all just a pile of malarkey, as Biden himself might say. And just to register one other, final complaint here, let’s address the idea that the mandate is a “temporary emergency order,” as defined by OSHA. If it’s actually “temporary,” that means there will be an end to it and a time when workers won’t have to provide proof of vaccination. But you can’t take the vaccine out of your body once it’s been injected. So it’s not really temporary at all for the vast majority of people.

https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/so-now-most-truck-drivers-will-be-exempt-vaccine-mandates

For Whom Do The COVID "Fact-Checkers" Really Work?

 by Vinay Prasad via The Brownstone Institute,

I recently came across two tweets that caught my eye...

Here is the first one from the CDC director:

And here is the second one, from a couple months back:

Together they got me thinking. What do they have in common?

What do they tell us about the state of the public communication of science?

Let’s start with the one by Dr. Walensky. I don’t know how to put this politely, but it is a lie, and a truly unbelievable one at that.

First, of all, if it were true, it would mean that masking was more effective that the J&J vaccine (implausible). Second of all, we have actual cluster RCT data from Bangladesh showing a 11% (relative risk reduction). This occurred in a massive trial where masks were provided for free and encouraged. Even here, only surgical masks worked, and cloth did not, and had no where near this effect size. The idea that masks could reduce the chance of infection by 80% is simply untrue, implausible, and cannot be supported by any reliable data.

The mathematician Wes Pegden had this to say about it, and Wes is right!

"The head of the agency responsible for providing Americans with accurate and trustworthy information about interventions (like vaccines) that we actually know are really effective should not also be making fabricated quantitative statements in support of poorly evidenced ones."

Yet, as far as I can see no organization nor twitter has fact checked this tweet and labeled it misleading. It is an untruth we are allowed to say.

Now let us turn to the AP’s fact checking claim. This is where things get interesting.

There are two types of COVID19 survivors— those who have documented recovery from sars-cov-2 (either PCR, antigen or serology + tests) or those who have self-identified recovery from sars-cov 2 (said they had it).

When it comes to the former group, we know with confidence, the chance they get re-infected and severely ill is very very low, and far lower than people who have not yet had and recovered from COVID19 (this is called natural immunity). The data in support of this is massive, and quite certain. Antibody data is beside the point— we care about the thing in itself getting sick.

So do these people (those who recovered) benefit from vaccination? Current data is solely observational— and that is a huge problem. If you compare people with recovery who chose to get the vax vs. those who chose not to get it— you are comparing very different types of people. Their behavior, and appetite to take risks (going out to crowded places) may also be different. We know both groups have very low rates of re-infection, but direct comparisons to assess vaccine efficacy after recovery are fraught.

The right answer would be to conduct an RCT of vaccination among those who recovered. It could have 3 arms. No further doses; 1 dose, or 2 doses. It could be large (after all, millions have recovered), and powered to look for rates of severe disease. In the absence of this, experts are largely speculating.

So here is what blows my mind: We are living in a world where the CDC director can say something that is false, made-up and no institution will say otherwise. At the same time, major, venerable fact checking institutions are literally asserting as fact something which is at best unproven.

No matter how you feel about these issues; these are dangerous times.

Truth and falsehood is not a matter of science but cultural power - the ability to proclaim and define the truth. If this continues, dark times lie ahead. Someday soon, we may not like who defines the truth.

Vinay Prasad MD MPH is a hematologist-oncologist and Associate Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California

*  *  *

ZH: Prasad and Pegden are not alone in their criticism, as Greg Piper writes at JustTheNews.com, the new study contradicts a much larger Israeli study this summer.

Attorney Jenin Younes, whose New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) files legal challenges against COVID vaccine mandates, tweeted that the study contradicts a meta-analysis touted by the CDC, which found "no significant difference" in protection between vaccination and natural immunity.

Immunologist Hooman Noorchashm, the medical expert for multiple NCLA challenges, called the study "another teleological piece of propaganda" by the CDC because it excludes the Johnson & Johnson vaccine and likely includes recovered people in the vaccinated group.

Harvard Medical School epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff tweeted that the study has a "major statistical flaw" - falsely portraying hospitalized respiratory patients as "representative of the population" — which renders the odds ratio "wrong."

Former New York Times journalist Alex Berenson argued the study "is meaningless gibberish that would never have been published if the agency did not face huge political pressure to get people vaccinated."

It's not even clear enough naturally immune people were hospitalized to reach statistical significance, he said, noting there's no unadjusted odds ratio.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/whom-do-covid-fact-checkers-really-work

Alkermes Gets Notices of Partial Termination From Janssen

 -- Investor Conference Call Scheduled for Today at 5:00 p.m. ET

- Alkermes plc (Nasdaq: ALKS) today announced that it received notices of partial termination (the "Notices") in respect of two license agreements with Janssen Pharmaceutica N.V. ("Janssen"), a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson and, under these agreements, a licensee and recipient of Alkermes' nanoparticulate formulation technology, known as NanoCrystal® technology. The terminations impact know-how royalties related to sales of long-acting paliperidone products, such as INVEGA SUSTENNA® and INVEGA TRINZA®, and other products in the United States. Pursuant to the agreements, the partial termination is to become effective three months from the date of receipt of the Notices. Janssen maintains that it has not utilized, and does not utilize, Alkermes' NanoCrystal technology licensed under the agreements. Alkermes strongly disagrees with Janssen's position and will explore all options at its disposal to enforce its contractual rights and address any unauthorized use of its intellectual property.

"For years, Janssen has highlighted the use of our NanoCrystal® technology in its long-acting INVEGA® products and has paid us know-how royalties consistent with this fact. We are not aware of any changes that have occurred to these products that would have altered their use of our intellectual property. We will continue our efforts to engage with Janssen to explore if a mutually agreeable resolution can be reached and will consider all options to enforce our contractual and intellectual property rights," said Richard Pops, Chief Executive Officer of Alkermes. "Over the last several years, we have been engineering the business to become less reliant on revenues from partnered products. For the expected growth drivers within our commercial portfolio – LYBALVI®, ARISTADA®, VIVITROL® and VUMERITY® – nothing has changed. We are energized by the opportunities in our pipeline and remain focused on advancing the assets that we believe will drive the future growth of the business and value for our shareholders."

Conference Call

Alkermes will host a conference call and webcast at 5:00 p.m. ET (10:00 p.m. GMT) on Monday, Nov. 8, 2021. The webcast may be accessed on the Investors section of Alkermes' website at www.alkermes.com. The conference call may be accessed by dialing +1 877 407 2988 for U.S. callers and +1 201 389 0923 for international callers. In addition, a replay of the conference call may be accessed by visiting Alkermes' website.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/alkermes-announces-receipt-notices-partial-210500041.html

UK to add China's Sinovac, India's Covaxin to approved vaccine list

 Britain said it would recognise COVID-19 vaccines on the World Health Organization's Emergency Use Listing later this month, adding China's Sinovac, Sinopharm and India's Covaxin to the country's approved list of vaccines for inbound travellers.

The changes, which come into force from Nov. 22, will benefit fully vaccinated people from countries including the United Arab Emirates, Malaysia and India.

The travel rules are being further simplified as all people under the age of 18 will be treated as fully vaccinated at the border and will be able to enter England without self-isolating on arrival, the Department for Transport said on Monday.

https://www.marketscreener.com/quote/stock/SINOVAC-BIOTECH-LTD-5714593/news/UK-to-add-China-s-Sinovac-India-s-Covaxin-to-approved-vaccine-list-36943828/

Not all Covid waves look the same--snapshot of the Delta surge

 At first, Joyce Dombrouski thought it might just be some kind of blip. Maybe it was Montana’s summer tourists. But then, at one point this August, St. Patrick Hospital in Missoula had 30-plus Covid inpatients — “and we thought 30, a year ago, was a horrific number,” said Dombrouski, the chief executive of Providence Montana.

It just kept growing. Three or four admissions a day, then five or six, then seven. The hospital was nearing capacity. There were more Covid patients in the ICU than the team had seen before, and they tended to be younger now. “Our median age has dropped to the mid-40s, and at the start of the pandemic, it was between 70 to 80,” Dombrouski went on. Then, her team got a call from Oklahoma, three wide western states away, asking if St. Patrick could take a transfer patient.

Waves of Covid can give you an awful sense of déjà vu. As “Hot Vax Summer” gave way early to Delta-anxious fall, you could be forgiven for feeling a familiar sense of dread, not so different from what you’d felt before the dismal winter of 2020 or the Southern surge that took off that July.

But not all spikes are created equal. The Delta-caused wave that now seems to be sloping downward has different demographics than previous waves, and provides a snapshot of the current state of the pandemic in the United States. While racial and ethnic disparities in Covid cases and deaths persist, some appear to have narrowed to a certain extent. Meanwhile, other divides in who’s getting seriously ill — rooted in geography, in vaccination status — seem to have grown, and epidemiologists don’t think those two trends are unrelated.

Being unvaccinated is the risk factor for hospitalization and death that public health experts emphasize most. Dombrouski said that about 90% of St. Patrick’s hospitalized Covid patients haven’t been immunized. That gap is just as obvious in national data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which showed that unvaccinated adults were hospitalized for Covid at a rate 12 times higher than the fully vaccinated.

To epidemiologists, that’s also one of the primary reasons for the age difference Dombrouski noticed: Lower vaccine coverage in younger age groups likely tugged down the average age of the sickest Covid patients. The CDC data show the proportion of hospitalized patients aged 18-49 increased from 25% pre-Delta to 36% amid the surge. Vaccination affected infection numbers more generally, too. While severe cases are uncommon in kids, the fact that they’ve become eligible for immunization later meant they began to account for a greater slice of new infections during the Delta wave than they had at the start of the pandemic.

Even though the shots’ ability to prevent coronavirus transmission was reduced by Delta, they remain remarkably good at preventing severe disease and death. For people who aren’t immunized, explained Naor Bar-Zeev, deputy director of Johns Hopkins’ International Vaccine Access Center, “the fact that the community around them is vaccinated is now less helpful than they might otherwise have been.”

That effect is only amplified by the country’s divisions. Vaccine hesitancy is a social phenomenon, and a shared suspicion ends up creating pockets of elevated risk, as Dombrouski saw in Montana.

“We’re seeing this kind of percolation of the virus, flaring up in unvaccinated networks, and then trickling through the vaccinated ones,” said Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “I’m saying ‘networks’ there quite deliberately, because we don’t have random mixing. You know, unvaccinated people tend to hang out with each other. And that means that you’ve got sort of stuttering transmission chains, which occasionally blow up.”

To Bar-Zeev, bridging those divides is paramount in order to make headway against Covid-19. “We’re not at a point where we can say, ‘There’s kooky weirdos who don’t get vaccinated.’ This is your mums and dads, your normal people in the community,” he said. Their concerns need to be addressed seriously and respectfully, he added: “We have to engage with them. They are the bread and butter of America.”

Throughout the pandemic, perhaps the clearest message written in death statistics was the profound health inequality of this country — how racism and economic insecurity become absorbed into bodies in the form of exposure risks and comorbidities, unfair access to care as American as apple pie. If you adjust the statistics to take into account the different distribution of ages in different ethnic and racial groups, Black, Hispanic, and American Indian, and Alaska Native people were all at least twice as likely as white people to die of Covid between March 2020 and August 2021, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation report using CDC data.

The gaps between various groups have fluctuated during the pandemic. Disparities tended to balloon as overall death and case rates rose, and then to flatten a bit as those general curves came down. Some of those disparities remained striking during the Delta wave: American Indian and Alaska Native communities have continued to experience some of the highest death rates of any group — a testament to the health impacts of colonialism and its long legacy of inequality. But for some groups, that pattern of disparities rising along with national Covid numbers appears to have shifted a bit.

“As we began to move into August and early September this year, which reflect the arrival of the Delta variant, we saw an increase in death rates, but the death rates for Black and Hispanic people remained similar to the rates for white people,” explained Latoya Hill, a senior policy analyst at the Kaiser Family Foundation, and one of the authors of the report.

There are some asterisks to keep in mind. Those recent statistics are not adjusted for the age distributions of those different groups, and the underlying structures that have created the disparities in the first place have not gone away. But Hill and her colleagues see some interesting hypotheses in those data.

“There’s likely a variety of factors contributing to this narrowing in disparities over time, including a decreasing gap in the vaccination rate across the country,” she said. Part of that effect may also have to do with reopening. Early in the pandemic, much of the risk was borne by essential workers, who are more likely to be people of color. But as stay-at-home orders lifted and many began interacting more, those who’d previously been sheltered may have been more susceptible to infection.

Geography may be a factor, too. “There actually has been a higher death rate in rural parts of the country in recent periods compared to early in the pandemic,” Hill said — and rural places are often whiter.

There seems to be a kind of perfect storm in some of those less populous places, greater suspicion of government recommendations dovetailing with the dynamics of where a variant happens to reach at what point. Some of the highest rates of vaccine hesitancy are in states of the mountain west, like Wyoming, pointed out Cecile Viboud, an epidemiologist at the National Institutes of Health’s Fogarty International Center. “They’ve also been a little bit late with this pandemic in the arrival of the different waves, and that’s true of the Delta wave as well,” she said — and what’s late in going up will be late in coming down, as we’ve seen recently.

Those rural surges come with challenges all their own. Often, small, local hospitals don’t have the equipment, staffing, or experience to take care of people so sick. “Some of them, you know, don’t have a respiratory therapist in house at night, or don’t have intensive care doctors,” said Robert Stansbury, an associate professor of pulmonary critical care, and sleep medicine at West Virginia University. “I have one very vivid memory of FaceTiming this doctor at two o’clock in the morning, and he’s like, ‘You know, this is the first vented patient I’ve taken care of in 20 years,’ and he was holding his phone up so I could see the waveform on the ventilator to try and help troubleshoot some issues.”

For Stansbury, it’s a relief to see Covid admissions at his hospital dropping dramatically. Why the decrease? “There’s a lot of conjecture,” he said. “I mean, I think more people are getting vaccinated. Like, that’s one. And I think a lot of the unvaccinated population either got Covid and have some natural immunity, or unfortunately passed from Covid.”

To Viboud, a central question is how well different kinds of immunity will hold up over time. “What the modeling world and we and others have been doing suggests that there’s a good level of immunity in the population, and that’s really what made the Delta wave come down finally,” she said. “That immunity is primarily through vaccination, but also through natural infections.” She’s optimistic about the next few months — provided they don’t bring the emergence of another, even less controllable variant.

https://www.statnews.com/2021/11/08/not-all-covid-waves-look-the-same-heres-a-snapshot-of-the-delta-surge/

Walensky said she’d ‘fix’ CDC, but nine months in, she’s faltering

 Operating via Zoom from her home office in Newton, Mass., Rochelle Walensky is facing down a challenge that would sound herculean for even the most hardened players in the federal bureaucracy: resuscitating the CDC.

Her challenge is especially tough because as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Walensky is a political outsider and finds herself playing second fiddle to Anthony Fauci, the face of the U.S. pandemic response who has advised presidents for decades. And there’s this: The White House has not hesitated to undercut Walensky’s scientific expertise, and the agency’s scientific process.

Walensky came in with a bold plan to resurrect the once-revered public health agency, aiming to breathe new life into a CDC sidelined by the Trump administration in the middle of once-in-a-generation pandemic.

“This top-tier agency, world renowned, hasn’t really been appreciated over the last four years and really markedly over the last year,” she told the Journal of the American Medical Association. “So I have to fix that.”

After nine months on the job, that plan has faltered, discouraging longtime CDC advocates.

“It’s been disappointing: A lot more was expected in terms of centralizing messaging and policies, and turning things over to government agencies and the leaders of those agencies,” said Glen Nowak, a University of Georgia professor who spent 14 years at the CDC, including six as its head of media relations.

Even the CDC’s staunchest supporters acknowledge that the agency has experienced numerous setbacks since Biden took office. The debate over who to blame, though, is still raging. Some have pinned recent stumbles on the agency and its politically inexperienced director Walensky, while others say that the White House’s own actions have made the CDC’s full revival impossible.

The continued tension radiating between Pennsylvania Avenue and the CDC’s Atlanta headquarters highlights the storied public health agency’s precarious standing in Washington. And it calls into question whether Walensky’s political inexperience has prevented her from following through on the sweeping promises she made before taking office — or whether the White House has actively prevented her from doing so.

“There’s always internal debate, and politics has always played a role,” said Georges Benjamin, the president of the American Public Health Association. “But have they made some rookie mistakes? You bet.”

A CDC spokesperson declined to make Walensky available for an interview.

Walensky, 52, has a sparkling resume as a physician-researcher: Two decades on the faculty of Harvard Medical School. Author of countless papers about HIV/AIDS. Service on numerous government advisory committees. In 2017, she became chief of infectious diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital.

But Walensky has never worked in government, and she has never managed an organization approaching the scale of the CDC and its 10,000-plus employees.

While few challenge Walensky’s academic and scientific qualifications to serve as the country’s top infectious diseases official, some argue that her lack of experience in government and relationships with Biden’s inner circle poses an obstacle to her at the CDC, especially at such a pivotal moment for the agency.

“There was an old adage when I first started working in pandemic planning: You don’t want to be meeting someone for the first time during a pandemic,” said Sonja Rasmussen, a University of Florida medical school professor and 20-year veteran of CDC and its pandemic-preparedness efforts. “That’s the situation that she’s in. Ideally, you’d have met these people — so they know you, they trust you.”

While Walensky is a relative newcomer, Biden has known his other pandemic-response aides for at least a decade: chief of staff Ron Klain has worked for Biden since 2009. The president has known scientific adviser David Kessler at least since the 1990s, when Biden was a senator and Kessler was Food and Drug Administration commissioner. And Biden has worked with Surgeon General Vivek Murthy since at least 2009, when President Obama first nominated him for the same role.

“Somebody coming in as a new CDC director is clearly going to be behind in terms of name recognition and awareness,” Nowak said. “And also, behind somewhat in terms of being up to speed” on the pandemic response.

Perhaps the starkest contrast is with Fauci. Beyond his official role as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, he has been the country’s de facto public health spokesman for nearly four decades. Accordingly, much of the country is more familiar with Fauci in his public-facing role than in his day job as the director of a $6.5 billion research institute.

His presence as a cable-news mainstay and White House whisperer has posed an unexpected challenge to Walensky’s struggle for credibility, according to many academics and officials in the field of public health.

“[Fauci is] a good communicator, a smart scientist who knows his way around government, and he’s had to answer tough questions,” said Benjamin. “Dr. Walensky is pretty good. But she’s going to get better over time. This isn’t the last hot seat she’s going to be in.”

Fauci himself has been a fierce advocate for Walensky. But he, too, has acknowledged there is room for growth.

“Give her a little time,” he told the New York Times in June. “By the end of one year, everybody’s going to be raving about her. I guarantee it.”

W

aensky has made several unforced errors, as has the CDC more broadly.

At one point, Walensky drew criticism for stating, unequivocally, that “vaccinated people cannot transmit the virus” — an assertion that turned out to be incorrect.

The agency drew criticism, too, for its 180-degree turn on mask guidance in May, when it essentially declared that all vaccinated Americans could remove their masks indoors.

In hindsight, many epidemiologists blame the summer’s devastating Delta variant surge, and the ensuing wave of deaths, on the CDC’s mask-guidance reversal.

Walensky has also failed to follow through on a number of the pledges she made when she took office: In particular, she has not resumed the regular briefings with lower-ranking scientists that she promised before taking office. The Trump administration largely canceled those briefings in early 2020 after Nancy Messonnier, the deputy CDC director, warned that Covid-19 would soon upend everyday life.

Compounding the issues, also, are long-running complaints that the agency is understaffed, and the June loss of a long-tenured agency leader: Anne Schuchat, the longtime principal deputy director who served 30-plus years at the agency.

Still, the stumbles have been noticed beyond the world of public health. A May column in the Boston Globe, Walensky’s hometown paper (which shares the same owner as STAT), proclaimed: “Rochelle Walensky has a credibility problem.”

But Biden and his White House have done plenty to undermine Walensky’s authority.

As a candidate, Biden pledged to “follow the science” and “listen to the doctors,” suggesting repeatedly that squabbles between the White House and public health agencies would disappear the day he took office.

But last February, hours after Walensky suggested during a press briefing that schools could safely reopen before all teachers were vaccinated, Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, dismissed the remarks, arguing that she had spoken “in her personal capacity.”

From an administration that had campaigned on restoring the credibility of public health agencies and government, it was a stunning rebuke of a brand-new CDC director who’d given a straightforward response to a straightforward question.

Some experts cast Psaki’s remarks as a one-off. Others, however, say that it foreshadowed a larger controversy that unfolded in the subsequent months: the White House’s push for booster shots.

The August announcement, that all American adults would soon be eligible for booster shots, rankled many scientists who had expected Biden to make good on his pledge of letting the scientific and regulatory processes play out without White House interference. Instead, the Biden administration appeared to assume that the FDA would authorize booster shots, and then that the CDC would recommend their use, universally and without reservation.

“There’s a method this goes through, and presupposing the way the decision-making process is going to end up makes people wonder if you’re following the science or doing things for political reasons,” said Rasmussen.

The White House’s booster stance eventually boxed Walensky into an uncomfortable position. In September, a CDC advisory committee recommended that Pfizer boosters be given to a dramatically smaller population than the White House had promised.

In effect, Walensky had to choose between ruling against the White House or ruling against the advisory board.

She sided with the White House, a move that Fauci called “courageous.” It was only the second known instance of a CDC director defying those advisers.

The CDC, of course, is no stranger to political pressure. Its Atlanta location only makes matters worse: Unlike the FDA and NIH, its peer institutions based in Washington suburbs, its leadership and staff can’t simply drive to the White House or Capitol for meetings.

And to be sure, the CDC’s current challenges pale in comparison to those it experienced during the Trump administration, and under the leadership of its previous director, the HIV/AIDS researcher Robert Redfield.

Redfield, too, largely ran the agency from his Baltimore-area home instead of its Atlanta headquarters, and had few prior relationships with high-level Trump administration aides. By the end of 2020, he was almost fully sidelined from the federal government’s pandemic response. (Redfield did, however, know Fauci before assuming the role of CDC director. Redfield co-authored research with Fauci as early as 1986.)

And while Redfield was dinged for not conducting public briefings or TV interviews, Walensky is the opposite: She is a cable news mainstay and, with Fauci and Murthy, conducts press briefings with the White House’s coronavirus response team more than once a week. And when on camera, she is comfortable and confident, a stark contrast from Redfield.

Even Walensky, though, has admitted at times that her efforts haven’t been enough.

“I am really struggling,” she told the Wall Street Journal in August, “with how to communicate to people who are worried about politics, and I just want them to continue to be at their family’s dinner table.”

https://www.statnews.com/2021/11/08/rochelle-walensky-cdc-faltering/