CDC’s Walensky parries Republican criticism over Biden’s Covid response

WASHINGTON — One of the very last duties of one of President Biden’s very first pandemic response officials was to spend two hours deflecting Republican criticisms of how she did her job.

GOP lawmakers took predictable shots at Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky over her comments about whether Covid-19 vaccines prevent transmission of the disease, how much influence teachers’ unions had over guidance for protocols in schools, and the agency’s data collection practices. House Republicans had been asking Walensky to testify for two months.

The hearing was an anticlimactic end to her tenure, which will finish at the end of June.

Walensky came away relatively unscathed. Republicans didn’t elicit major revelations about her interactions with the White House, and she didn’t apologize for statements that vaccines prevent transmission of Covid-19, maintaining that her comments were supported by data at the time, and that mutations of the virus changed the nature of vaccines’ effectiveness over time.

She sidestepped thorny issues about gain of function research raised by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) by referring questions to the National Institutes of Health, which she does not oversee, and questions from Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) about CDC officials’ relationships with social media companies regarding vaccine misinformation by saying that the matter was being litigated in the court, so she couldn’t comment on it publicly. The hearing Tuesday was before the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability.

When Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.) tried to press Walensky on why she wasn’t wearing a mask in a hearing based on guidance on the CDC’s website, Walensky was able to parry, referencing additional places on the agency’s website that provided up-to-date hospitalization data.

When Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) pressed Walensky about her future plans and whether she plans to work for Moderna or Pfizer, Walensky said she doesn’t have any future plans after she leaves her position, and that the CDC doesn’t purchase vaccines.

One of the few points she did concede was that the CDC didn’t collect data on whether people who were hospitalized were vaccinated, in a back-and-forth with Rep. Rich McCormick (R-Ga.), who is a freshman member who served as an emergency room doctor until 2022.

“We don’t have that at a national level,” Walensky said. “At a national level, we get hospitalization data, we get hospitalization for Covid data, but at a national level we have never been able to get hospitalization, vaccination, and Covid.”

And then, she used it to argue that the CDC should have more access to data, which lawmakers are debating in a current reauthorization of pandemic preparedness programs. She said that even though physicians may be entering the data in electronic health records systems, that data isn’t necessarily getting passed to public health agencies.

Her successor, who is expected to be longtime federal and state health official Mandy Cohen, will likely also face a tumultuous political environment in Congress, including continuing oversight of the agency by House Republicans, threats to public health funding through the federal government funding process, and reauthorizations of pandemic preparedness programs that could become contentious in the coming months.