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Well continue to put public health first. 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW Why a Covid-19 vaccine doesn't mean that you can stop wearing a mask. NEW YORK (AP) As the coronavirus swept across the globe last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sank into the shadows, undermined by some of its own mistakes and stifled by an administration bent on downplaying the nations suffering. We are ready for whatever the science tells us.We have secured enough vaccine supply, and, if needed, we will ensure Americans who might need a booster shot are able to get it quickly and easily. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky has come under criticism for the confusing messaging. "A vaccine may feel unnecessary. And Ill pass it back to Jeff. So, wondering if you all can paint a picture of who is actually being hospitalized by the Delta variant. Next slide shows data from the UK with the Delta variant, which the Pfizer-BioNTech, which clearly reflects what well be seeing with Moderna, is 96 percent effective against hospitalization. Dr. Walensky, a widely respected infectious disease expert known for her battles with drug companies over prohibitive prices, seemed ideally suited. It reads: "Hard things are hard. Eventually, she became his boss. Already, she's fielded blowback for the new CDC guidance on when and how schools should reopen, and she's openly worried about new, more transmissible variants spreading nationwide. NPR's Ari Shapiro speaks with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky about new guidelines that have the isolation period for asymptomatic people who have COVID.. MR. ZIENTS: So, lastly, on international travel, you know, weve made, as we talked about today, important progress on the pandemic. The President, yesterday, said that he was hoping for a timeline to set a timeline for lifting some travel restrictions in the next couple of days. WALENSKY: We have seen certainly a surge in cases, a rise in cases. Flu hospitalizations for this time of year are higher than they have been in a decade. Meet the Team He works at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute where he joined in 2003 as an attending physician in pediatric hematology/oncology and in 2006 he founded his cancer chemical biology research laboratory. Do we believe that they will maintain some protection against infection? Published Rochelle Walensky is the daughter of Edward Bersoff and Carol Bersoff-Bernstein. Turn on desktop notifications for breaking stories about interest? Tens of millions have been infected. And what do we do now?' Some experts suggest that an administration that values science and increases funding could restore the CDC to preeminence. and the country out of the pandemic. Were going to have to really seriously address these myths that are floating around, and Im not even sure how to start to do that, she added. And please do it to protect your young children who, right now, cant get vaccinated themselves. She ordered the hospital staff to wear masks before it became the national norm, and advised the mayor of her town and the governor on testing and prevention of Covid-19. At Massachusetts General Hospital, where Walensky was the chief of infectious diseases, some of her many admirers now have T-shirts that read "Answer the Code" with her initials, RPW, beneath. And communities that are fully vaccinated are generally faring well.You can see the patterns of local outbreaks in the slide of community transmission. I am so grateful to @JoeBiden @KamalaHarris and @Transition46 for their faith in this truly remarkable woman. ZIENTS: Oh, go ahead, Dr. Walensky. Theres a lot that we are doing and well continue to do more, but this is a moment where we need technology companies to step up and do more to stop the spread of misinformation. Walensky declined to give a timeline on Tuesday on when the CDC will release new guidance for schools after publishing information over the weekend suggesting schools should not keep masking policies in place until the end of this school year. She called out the drug company Gileads pricing of its preventive therapy for H.I.V. ZIENTS: Dr. Walensky, do you want to take the second question? She saw many people . Next question. Rochelle Walensky, MD, MPH, Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), has now suffered a Paxlovid rebound of Covid-19 like Anthony Fauci, MD, and U.S. President Joe Biden . And she likens the call she got from the Biden administration to a hospital alarm that goes off when a patient is in cardiac arrest. Rochelle Walensky is an American physician-scientist. Mistrust of the coronavirus vaccine was a major topic of discussion at an ACIP meeting last week. He works at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute where he joined in 2003 as an attending physician in pediatric hematology/oncology and in 2006 he founded his cancer chemical biology research laboratory. WALENSKY: The messaging that we're using in terms of protecting older people from COVID but also from other respiratory pathogens - and including influenza and RSV, both of which impact older. She has a long history working on HIV and has, in the past year, become a tour de force in addressing COVID. The recent exits of two high-ranking agency officials within the C.D.C. director he chose would be free to make scientifically grounded decisions without interference from politicians. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said more than 4.1 million adolescents 12 to 17 have been vaccinated so far, including over half a million 12-15-year-olds who have lined up to get a shot since the Pfizer vaccine was authorized for adolescents earlier this month. You can just look at her and just by her presence know that she is both competent and dedicated, said Schaffner, a liaison representative on the CDCs Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Dr. Walensky served as Chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital from 2017-2020 and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School from 2012-2020. In 2008 she won the Emerging Leader in HIV Research sponsored by the HIV Medical Association and the Infectious Disease Society of America. Like, will you be personally masking up at the supermarket or just avoiding large gatherings in general? Take a COVID test if you have symptoms. Some of its advice had been twisted by the Trump administration, and her message was clear: The C.D.C. And this type of localized, person-to-person approach takes some time, but it is working.In the past 10 days, 5 million Americans have rolled up their sleeves to get a shot in their arms, and millions more Americans will get vaccinated across the summer months.Importantly, states with the highest case rates are seeing their vaccination rates go up. Slavitt said he knows it may be easy for young people to think COVID-19 doesn't affect them because they may feel healthy and be asymptotic but emphasized that experts still don't know enough about the long-term effects of the disease. They will know that she knows what its like to be at the bedside of a very sick patient, he said. Its another life protected. They were both Jewish, and shared a deep interest in medicine and music she played the flute and he was a classical pianist. Dr. Redfield did not respond, and later in the year the agency suspended diversity training programs following an executive order from the Trump administration. Younger unvaccinated people weve spoken to believe they will likely be fine if they get infected with coronavirus. The C.D.C. While public health veterans say they do not know everything that happened behind the scenes, they say Redfield apparently failed to stand up for agency scientists, declined to contradict Trump and those around him and passively allowed the Trump administration to post its messaging on CDC websites. DR. FAUCI: Yes, well, as Dr. Rochelle Walensky has said multiple times, the CDC is looking at a number of different cohorts that will get the information that will be needed as she said if and when and to whom we will be giving boosters. We are seeing outbreaks of cases in parts of the country that have low vaccination coverage because unvaccinated people are at risk. When the pandemic began, Dr. Walensky, 52, was chief of the infectious diseases division at Massachusetts General Hospital. Its my responsibility to tell both of those stories.. Over the next few months, Bernstein spent hours and hours in meetings with CDC officials, including agency Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky, and then more time preparing presentations on education . ", Biden Names Massachusetts Doctor To Lead CDC, HHS Spokesperson Takes Leave of Absence After Disparaging Government Scientists, House Oversight Committee Chair: Testimony Points To Political Interference At CDC, Coronavirus Vaccine Q&A: Variants, Side Effects, And More, CDC Offers Clearest Guidance Yet For Reopening Schools, If Schools Follow CDC Guidance, Biden's Reopening Goals Could Be Hard To Reach, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. So, while we are in a far better position than we were in January through April, this increased in red area is giving us all a reason to double-down and get more people vaccinated.The good news is that if you are fully vaccinated, you are protected against severe COVID, hospitalization, and death, and are even protected against the known variants including the Delta variant circulating in the country.If you are not vaccinated, you remain at risk. ". At Tuesday's White House briefing, senior coronavirus adviser Andy Slavitt revealed that one of his sons, Zach, who is 19, has serious lingering effects from COVID-19 -- six months after he first tested positive. It was Dr. Fauci, who had known and admired her work on H.I.V., who recommended her. I just was wondering if you guys could share a little bit more detail on the current state of thinking around boosters. That analytic skill has come in handy over the past year, as she has helped lead the pandemic response for her Boston hospital and for the state of Massachusetts. So, if Walensky had a Wonder Woman superpower, it was using data to inform decisions and save lives. And as Dr. Walensky and Dr. Fauci have said theyve made it very clear this is a question that they are continually evaluating. I have heard from my colleagues in the hospital that some of the nurses and health care workers are unwilling to be vaccinated because they have heard that its going to affect their fertility and there are some other myths that are floating around, Carol Hayes, a nurse midwife whos a liaison representative to ACIP, said at the meeting. Susan Walsh/AP Even when it's bad news. The shirts are part of an outpouring of affection in Boston biomedical circles and far beyond that greeted Walensky's appointment including a flood of floral bouquets that her husband and three sons helped answer the door to accept after word of her new job got out. In 2017, she became chief of infectious diseases at M.G.H., the first woman and the third person to hold the job in 70 years. Loren Walensky recalls coming home one day to find her sitting at the kitchen table working on extremely complex math. ZIENTS: I just want to also be very crystal clear from an operational perspective: Were prepared for every scenario, including the possibility of boosters, if and when the science, as Dr. Fauci said, shows that they are needed. and made similar arguments about the pricing of Gileads Covid drug remdesivir. So does that mean were not going to see full approval for their vaccine until January 2022? So to protect communities in those circumstances at those high levels, we have recommended and continue to recommend that those communities wear masks. Even before the surveys were rolled out in December 2020 after the first vaccines were authorized, the CDC knew that myocarditisa form of heart . Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the C.D.C. "I got called during a code," she says. WALENSKY: And maybe MR. But that enthusiasm has been tempered by occasional missteps in communications, an aspect of the job that is more important and challenging than it has ever been. But what should we be doing to keep everyone safe from illness? She has been selected to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the Biden . Dr. Walensky was known as a tough-minded advocate for people with AIDS. The day of her urgent plea, she appeared on MSNBCs The Rachel Maddow Show, where she said vaccinated people do not carry the virus an overly optimistic statement that the C.D.C. At Vanderbilt, weve been doing Covid Vaccine 101, 102, 103, 104, said Schaffner, a professor in the division of infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. https://t.co/VtMNdLN06p, Jen Kates (@jenkatesdc) December 7, 2020. Even apart from the fact that she is only the third woman to lead the agency, Im a different kind of C.D.C. I think people have had some more time to read about and think about the vaccine, he said. And if you look at the far right of the slide, as of just a couple of days ago, they are very low. If and when. scientist, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said in April. Walensky's family has a tradition of service, including a grandfather who served in World War II and rose to be a brigadier general. Several topics were raised during the hearing, including the pause on the Johnson and Johnson vaccine, the timeline for reopening schools, and COVID-19 testing for . It was the mid-'90s, and the AIDS epidemic was still raging. Covid has taken up nearly all of Dr. Walenskys attention, but she has a long list of ambitious goals for the agency post-pandemic, including modernizing the nations public health infrastructure, addressing the health impact of climate change and managing what she called the collateral damage of the pandemic. The Walenskys decided early on that they would not work evenings or weekends, would be home for dinner every day, and take laptop-free vacations whenever their children were off school. It's amazing. and the exclusion of women from its clinical trials as unacceptable.. By late 2020, reports that the Trump administration had rewritten recommendations purported to be from agency experts further damaged public trust. "You can't do everything," Freedberg says, "and even if you could, you can't do everything at once. MODERATOR: Go to Erin Billups at Spectrum News. If you do get those symptoms, call your providers early because there are tests not just for COVID-19 but also for influenza. White House coronavirus adviser Andy Slavitt, right, with son Zach and wife Lana, in an undated family photo. Redfield kept a low profile during his first two years in office after being appointed by the Trump administration in 2018. (RAGS) (DJH) March 2, 2023 Were asking them to operate with greater transparency, to modify their algorithms to avoid amplifying misinformation, and to swiftly and consistently take action against misinformation super-spreaders on their platforms.Shortly after releasing the advisory, we saw organizations like the Rockefeller Foundation, the Digital Public Library of America, and the American Academy of Pediatrics step up and respond to this call to action by committing their time, resources, and networks to confronting health misinformation. Rochelle is married to Loren Walensky, a pediatric oncologist, cancer chemical biologist and director of the Harvard/MIT MD-PhD Program. We also - you know, we'll consider doing testing before we all gather. And the common thread that ran through our conversations was their struggle to help their communities navigate information about COVID-19. I'm joined today by the head of the CDC, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, to help us make sense of the latest virus surge and what . When youre talking about young people, specifically, getting hospitalized, we are seeing younger people hospitalized right now, relatively speaking to a more extent than we were before. They married in 1995 and have three sons. "Last fall, one of my sons contracted COVID-19. My husband looked over. And its great to be with all of you again today. Things You Must Check Before Ordering Clip-In Extensions Online. With that, I will now turn it over to Dr. Fauci.DR. So do we anticipate that they're going to have the same rates of protection as they did for the original strain? Rochelle Walensky was born to a father called Edward Bersoff and a mother identified as Carol Bersoff-Bernstein. Please enable JavaScript to use this feature. The White House Ive heard some commentary though, suggesting that among immunosuppressed people and the elderly, they might be needed. Statement from Rochelle P. Walensky, MD, MPH, Director, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. For months, on these briefings, weve talked about barriers to getting vaccinated. MR. ZIENTS: Dr. Fauci?DR. CHANG: CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky, thank you very much for joining us again. would no longer bend to political meddling. It's a spotlight on the continued health threat posed by the pandemic. She favors the John Snow Memorandum, which advocates an alternative, risk-based approach to the COVID-19 pandemic that involves Focused Protection of those most at risk and seeks to avoid or minimize the societal harm of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns. Dr. Rochelle Walensky, who has been selected to serve as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention speaks during an event at The Queen theater in Wilmington, Del., Tuesday, Dec. 8 . Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky gives her opening statement during a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing to discuss the on-going federal response to Covid-19, May 11, 2021, in Washington, DC. If you look at the average daily prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant worldwide, if you look at the righthand part of the slide, you see the extraordinary surge in the dominance of this variant worldwide. And if you are diagnosed early, we have antivirals that can be used to shorten your disease course and your disease severity. Biddinger said he thinks health care workers attitudes might have changed since then. And just this week, I traveled to New Mexico to meet with youth leaders, clinicians, and public health leaders from across the state. But veterans in public health said such changes are expected after a leadership change and have occurred before. It will take all of us. She started doing more research, including studies of ways to get more patients tested and treated for AIDS, even in the poorest countries. COVID response adviser Andy Slavitt said his son has symptoms 6 months later. Biden has pledged to put scientists out front on COVID-19 matters, Besser noted. CHANG: I mean, why isn't the CDC more strongly recommending masking in public places right now, during this so-called tripledemic? She is recognized internationally for her work to improve HIV screening and care in South Africa. The camp guidance is intended to get our kids to camp and allow them to stay there," she continued. Thank you, Zeke.