Former CDC Director says be wary of vaccine info on CDC website

It pains Rochelle Walensky, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to hear people say that the agency can’t be trusted. But these days, she said, people should be cautious about the vaccination information on its website. 

“What I can say is the vaccine information on the CDC is not necessarily that of the subject matter experts or the CDC, but there’s a lot of other great information on this CDC website that I don’t believe has been tainted with as of yet,” she said in response to a question at a media briefing in Boston Friday, calling her former colleagues heroes who are doing their best.

“What I will also say is that our medical societies — AAP, ACOG, the Infectious Disease Society of America, AMA — are putting out information,” she said about groups, whose members include pediatricians, OB-GYNs, and physicians from other specialties. 

“All of that used to be consistent with the CDC’s websites,” Walensky said. “Now it’s no longer. And the thing that has changed is not the societies. It’s what’s being posted on the CDC by our vaccine skeptics.”

She encouraged people looking for answers to go to those medical organizations, hospitals, or their health care providers.

The briefing was organized by Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) one day after Health and Humans Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spoke at a tumultuous Senate hearing dominated by questions about vaccine policies. Markey has joined Democratic politicians, nine former CDC directors (including Walensky), medical and public health organizations, and other groups demanding Kennedy resign. 

“It’s lie after lie after lie from Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,” Markey said at the event held outside a Boston community health center expected to suffer from funding cuts to Medicaid. 

Asked if he thought Kennedy’s position was secure, Markey noted President Trump’s continued support but also pointed to questions raised by Republican senators at the hearing.

“Congress is a stimulus-response institution,” Markey said, encouraging Americans to speak out about Kennedy’s health policies.

At Thursday’s hearing, Kennedy expressed harsh criticism of the CDC, saying the agency was “corrupt” and that its leaders “did not do their job,” particularly during the Covid pandemic.

Responding to STAT’s request for comment, an HHS spokesperson said Friday, “Secretary Kennedy has been clear: the CDC has been broken for a long time. Restoring it as the world’s most trusted guardian of public health will take sustained reform and more personnel changes.”

“From his first day in office, Secretary Kennedy pledged to check his assumptions at the door — and he asked every HHS colleague to do the same,” the statement continued. “That commitment to evidence-based science is why, in just seven months, he and the HHS team have accomplished more than any health secretary in history in the fight to end the chronic disease epidemic and Make America Healthy Again.”

Walensky, for her part, acknowledged feeling the heat of public pressure  in her two and a half years as CDC director, starting in January 2021 as a political outsider.

“Maybe my then-paucity of government experience was my Achilles heel. I will call it my North Star,” she said.

“With 4,000 people dying every single day in the United States from Covid-19, I took the directorship of a weary agency,” she recalled. “Decision requests reached my desk when there were only bad answers to choose from and sparse data to guide them.”

Walensky said she was proud of helping to put nearly 700 million Covid-19 vaccine doses into arms, an effort estimated to have saved 3.2 million lives. And she drew a line between the perception of the CDC’s performance then and the situation now. CDC’s shortcomings, real or imagined, during the pandemic’s height, she argued, are being used as a pretext to dismantle the agency and programs that guarantee access to vaccines.  

“HHS leadership is inching towards a complete vaccine takedown, incrementally chiseling away at our previously trusted systems, leaving behind a shaky, fragmented vaccine facade that is increasingly obscure and untenable and that has already limited vaccine access,” she said.

Lives will be lost, Walensky predicted, because of such political disagreements. She worries in particular about the Vaccine for Children Program. Created in 1993, it offers under- and uninsured children free access to the full pediatric vaccine schedule covering 19 diseases. It’s credited with preventing 472 million illnesses and saving $2.2 trillion dollars, she said, but it now faces review by the newly overhauled Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Many of the new Kennedy-appointed members of the panel have a clear anti-vaccine bias, she said. 

Still, she said, “in today’s divided America, there’s actually one consensus that remains: 92% of parents still vaccinate their children. Surely we can all agree we don’t want our children to die.” 

STAT’s coverage of chronic health issues is supported by a grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies. Our financial supporters are not involved in any decisions about our journalism.