Centers for Disease Control Director Rochelle Walensky departs after testifying on the All Hazard Preparedness Act before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions at the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Thursday, May 4, 2023, in Washington, DC.
Kent Nishimura | Los Angeles Times | Getty Images
CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky announced Friday that she will resign at the end of June, ending a tenure marked by frequent changes to adapt to the evolving coronavirus crisis.
Walensky did not give a specific reason for his departure, but did mention it in a letter to the President. Joe Biden America is getting out of emergency covid-19 response,
“The end of the COVID-19 public health emergency marks a tremendous change for our country, for public health, and throughout my tenure as CDC director,” Walensky Wrote in the letter.
“I took on this role, at your request, with the goal of moving past the dark days of the pandemic and moving CDC — and public health — to a better and more trusted place,” she said.
The US public health emergency will end on Thursday. World Health Organization on Friday announced the end to global covid health emergency.
Biden thanked Walensky for her service in a statement.
The president said, “Dr. Walensky leaves CDC as a stronger organization, better positioned to meet health threats and protect Americans.”
Walensky acknowledged in August 2022 that the CDC’s response Epidemic was insufficient. She initiated a reorganization that sought to make the agency faster to respond to disease threats and improve the communication of health guidance to the public.
But the CDC still struggles to respond to public health threats because of limited authority in the face of a fragmented health care system. The agency will have less data to track covid and new versions when the public health emergency ends because it cannot force states to report this information.
Walensky took over the leadership of the battered agency in early 2021 as the US was rolling out its Covid vaccination campaign. He took command of the Public Health Agency while the national pandemic response suffered repeated setbacks from the emergence of the Delta and Omicron variants.
Walensky also helped lead the US response to a sudden outbreak of mpox in the summer of 2022.
She headed the infectious diseases department at Massachusetts General Hospital and was a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School before joining the Biden administration. Walensky is an expert on HIV.
