The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
otherwise known as the CDC,
has faced some major criticisms during the pandemic,
ultimately highlighting that the public health agency
failed to meet the world's expectations.
So in an effort to learn from past mistakes,
its director has initiated an overhaul
meant to revamp everything from the agency's operations
to its culture.
I flew down to its headquarters in Atlanta
to ask CDC Director Rochelle Walensky
how the revamp is going.
When you first announced Moving Forward,
you laid out your vision
for the agency and how
it must evolve and here
you said that the agency was,
“responsible for some pretty dramatic, pretty public mistakes.”
Now that was quite candid.
And I wonder what examples
you were thinking of when you shared that message
internally with CDC staff.
It wasn't hard to find headlines of places
where CDC was taking heat.
One of them, of course, was the lab
and the early diagnostic test that came out.
And others have just been
confusing and complicated messages.
Great news this week.
The CDC announced that fully vaccinated people no longer have
to wear masks or socially distance, except if you go to most places.
except if you go to most places.
Early on, our guidance was very technical.
We were not necessarily accustomed to having
our guidance be a place
where every American would click on CDC
and read our school guidance or read our quarantine guidance.
But that's how it was being utilized now.
So we had to rise to the occasion.
So one of those components was really delivering our science
in real time when we knew it.
And then the 2nd is
saying it in plain language.
What does this mean?
What are the things that it doesn't say?
What are the things that it does say?
And what is still unknown?
Among the changes, Dr. Walensky will require
all employees be ready to deploy
to combat health crises,
marking a drastic shift from a volunteer system
the agency relied on to staff its Covid-19 response.
It is difficult with multiple responses,
to have the same people respond again and again and again.
And so what we need to do
is to make sure that every person in this agency actually
considers response as a critical element of their job.
There's a number of activities that we're doing now
to sort of move in that direction.
I think there's a lot of challenges that we're overcoming.
We were very siloed in the way we respond
to various threats before Covid-19.
The level of the response needed really required us to
work across the agency to pull together.
What I wanted that restructuring to reflect
is high visibility, accountability within the agency and
what are those key places
that we really need to be responsible.
So things like our laboratory, our Office of Science,
our public health infrastructure and workforce.
I really want to decrease
layers of reporting,
decrease the bureaucracy, if you will.
We're in a BSL-4 laboratory training facility.
Biosafety level 4.
Yes. We train people so that they can work safely
and effectively when they're really dealing with
the most pathogenic agents
that we have, things like smallpox, Ebola.
When we looked at what's happened in the pandemic,
there were really 3 things we want to do better.
The 1st is we can't have a test that goes out
that doesn't have a thorough enough quality review.
The 2nd thing, we need to get it
as fast as possible to the private sector.
And the 3rd thing, we want to make sure
we stay on top of the best technologies,
because we would like to have tests
like the tests that you get in drugstores
but to be as accurate as the PCR test.
I heard a lot of optimism
from CDC staff about their plans to move forward.
But one potential obstacle is Congress.
Funding is a place we've seen Congress reach a roadblock.
What kind of resources will it take to execute
the strategy that you've laid out?
One of the challenges of CDC, when I got here was that
we were working off a frail,
underfunded public health infrastructure, not just the CDC,
but around the country.
There have been data that have suggested that the workforce
the workforce is 80,000
public health workers in deficit.
Wow.
When you start with that infrastructure and you
layer on top of it a global pandemic that affects 330 million Americans,
that affects 330 million Americans,
you have challenges at the get go.
Moving Forward, in my mind
is really a lot about
what's the best, most efficient way
that we can take the resources that we have right now and
leverage them to do the best that we can within CDC.
There will be areas and places where we will ask
for additional resources in our public health infrastructure,
in our data modernization efforts, in our laboratory capacity.
And then there will be places that we fully recognize
that we're going to need congressional help
in order to be nimble.
I want to talk about politics for a moment
because science has become political.
I wonder what the toll of that has been on the CDC.
Sometimes it's harder in a politically charged environment,
but our job is to deliver health in a bipartisan way.
I always go back to when I'm standing in front of a patient,
they don't necessarily challenge the reason that you're there.
They know that you're there to care for them.
This agency perceives the country as their patient.
So the most important thing that we do is put our head down,
do the science, public health,
action-oriented work to deliver health.
We're going to need to demonstrate that
regardless of the political powers that are out there.