CDC DIRECTOR ROCHELLE WALENSKY FACES A SURGING VIRUS—AND A CRISIS OF TRUST
IF VIRUSES KNOW NO BORDERS, THEY have an equal disdain for human holidays. On Thanksgiving 2021, Dr. Rochelle Walensky shut off her phone for about 45 minutes and placed the turkey on the dining table to enjoy the holiday meal with her husband and three sons. When she turned the phone back on, she found, among the messages that had piled up, warnings that SARS-CoV-2 had morphed into a potentially dangerous new variant, identified in South Africa. Health officials there predicted that what would become known as the Omicron variant was much better at spreading than previous variants, and Walensky knew it was only a matter of time before Omicron cases would appear in the U.S.
As director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Walensky’s job is to protect the nation, and by extension the world, from threats like this one. To buy time as she and the country’s public-health experts learned as much as they could about the new variant, she joined them in advising that flights from South Africa and nearby nations reporting cases be temporarily halted. She also beefed up genetic-sequencing efforts to monitor for the new variant so health officials would know as soon as the first cases hit the country.
By Christmas, Omicron had overtaken Delta as the dominant variant, accounting for almost 60% of new infections in the nation, and over that holiday weekend, Walensky and the country’s top COVID-19 experts wrestled with a difficult decision. With thousands of flights canceled as airline staff tested positive for COVID-19 and were unable to work, and with hospitals, schools and food industries similarly tottering under the pressure of maintaining an adequate labor force as Omicron pulled employee after employee into the COVID-19-positive ranks, Walensky and the CDC made the critical, and controversial, decision to cut the isolation times for people who were infected by half,
