More reporting on Walnesky's testimony from Alex Gutentag on Public
@crush
On Tuesday CDC Director Rochelle Walensky testified before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. Chairman Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) opened the hearing by explaining that Walensky was appearing under threat of subpoena after months of stonewalling.
“It appears that maybe the Biden Administration did not want you to speak regarding these topics,” Wenstrup said to Walensky. And indeed, Walensky’s testimony made it clear why that may have been the case.
First, Walensky disclosed that the CDC did not have — and never has had — national data about COVID hospitalizations by vaccination status. "At a national level we have never been able to get hospitalization, vaccination, and COVID [data]” she
said. “We did not get data in aggregate on vaccination and hospitalizations."
This is more than just a simple data collection problem. Recall that the Biden administration justified vaccine mandates for healthcare workers and federal employees through the claim that, across the country, unvaccinated people were at high risk for death and hospitalization. “For [the] unvaccinated, we are looking at a winter of severe illness and death… for themselves, their families, and the hospitals they’ll soon overwhelm,” Biden warned in December 2021. Now it turns out, as Walensky divulged, there was never national hospitalization data to support this claim. Surprise!
At another point in Walensky’s testimony, when asked about her 2021 statement that COVID vaccines prevented transmission, she
answered, “that was true for the alpha variant at the time that I said it.” The vaccine trials, though, did not test for transmission, and some people in the vaccine group still got symptomatic illness. So her claim was largely based on wishful thinking, not actual data.
Walensky’s testimony is characteristic of her tenure as CDC director. Vaccine policy was the defining aspect of her time as director, yet Walensky once admitted that she first learned about the vaccines’ efficacy
from CNN, not from reading the actual trials. Her job as CDC director was to both understand and effectively communicate national public health data, and her legacy will be that she did neither.
—AG
