Last year, she began a reorganization designed to make the agency more nimble and to improve its communications with the public. Reported cases, hospitalizations and deaths have all been trending down for months.Īt CDC, Walensky started a center for forecasting and outbreak analytics and took steps to modernize data collection and analysis. His research examines vaccines and vaccination policy, decision-making in medical regulation and public health policy, and the structure and. She leaves at a time when the national COVID-19 death toll stands at about 1.1 million. Schwartz is an Associate Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Yale School of Public Health. The CDC regained prominence in government messaging - although even under Biden, the White House remained at center stage in the handling of the response, Schwartz said. “No CDC director in history inherited the set of challenges she faced coming into the job,” said Jason Schwartz, a health policy expert at the Yale School of Public Health. The Trump administration had marginalized the agency, with the White House taking over the government’s messaging about the pandemic and sometimes opposing or undermining what the CDC wanted to do. COVID-19 deaths had been reported, and states were scrambling to get supplies of new vaccines.
At the time of her arrival, more than 400,000 U.S.
