House GOP tells outgoing CDC Director Walensky administration 'hung you out to dry'

It took 10 weeks of negotiations with the Department of Health and Human Services to get CDC Director Rochelle Walensky to testify this week before a GOP-led House oversight committee on the pandemic – almost too late before her late-June exit, says the panel's chairman. 

"Maybe you were willing the whole time," Chairman GOP Rep. Brad Wenstrup said, amid what what he called the "seemingly illogical excuses" the department gave for withholding Walensky.

The long wait to review her 29-month record on COVID policy – ended by a threatened subpoena – produced mixed results at the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic hearing Tuesday. 

Walensky repeatedly declined to answer questions related to the agency's alleged efforts to censor purported COVID misinformation, citing litigation.

She instead told full House Oversight committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) that her top priority was to "get facts out to people ... in plain language" and convince Americans "how well [vaccines] worked."

Subcommittee member Rep. Rich McCormick, a Georgia Republican, served as a physician on the COVID frontlines through December yet was censored and had his license threatened for statements ultimately proven correct. 

He told Walensky: "Black liberals and white conservatives are both mistrusting" of Center of Disease Control and Preventions claims.

Republicans on the panel got Walensky to admit American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, who demanded strict conditions for school reopening including a "closure trigger," had Walensky's personal and official cellphone numbers and that they "may" have texted on both.

In her own hearing, Weingarten acknowledged a direct line to Walensky.

Wallensky said she didn't delete any texts due to federal retention rules and admitted more may come out amid "hundreds" of Freedom of Information Act requests.

GOP lawmakers say they have five texts.

While the CDC sought "feedback from 50 other" groups before releasing its reopening guidance, which didn't adopt AFT's proposed trigger, Walensky rejected Wenstrup's invitations to dismiss the trigger as unscientific or at least "unwarranted."

Wenstrup also said the CDC has yet to turn over a "single document" on the drafting of reopening guidance in response to a subcommittee request 11 weeks ago and asked Walensky to "fully commit" to complying.

She promised to "act in good faith and get you the documents we can" and make agency employees available for transcribed interviews.

California Rep. Raul Ruiz, the panel's top Democrat, praised Walensky for guiding the U.S. "out of the darkest days" of the COVID-19 pandemic, leading the "most successful vaccination campaign" in U.S. history and reopening the vast majority of schools "forced to close" by President Trump in just a year.

Congress can thank the CDC by giving it "expanded workforce authorities" such as direct hire authority, overtime and "danger pay" to reduce the shortage of public health workers, Walensky told Ruiz.

Some Republicans expressed sympathy for the political challenges Walensky faced, particularly when the White House dismissed her comments on the safety of reopening schools in February 2021 as "personal," though she spoke at a White House press conference.

Walensky on Tuesday stood by her view, citing the "other five layers" of mitigation available to schools before vaccines were widely available to teachers.

The agency acted quickly to update guidance when warranted, she said, such as reducing in-school physical distance to three feet from the six feet inexplicably assumed necessary in the U.S., an international outlier.

"I think you tried to be honest," said House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), also an Oversight member.

However, he suggested, Walensky started making "misleading statements" after the Biden administration "hung you out to dry."

GOP lawmakers seized on her spring 2021 claims that COVID vaccines fully stop transmission and infection, which the CDC quickly walked back at the time. 

Walensky claimed Tuesday that was "generally true" for the Wuhan and Alpha variants of SARS-CoV-2.

However, University of California San Francisco epidemiologist Tracy Beth Hoeg – who testified in a different committee on CDC pandemic policy last week – noted transmission wasn't even tested in the trials.

Walensky also declined Wenstrup's invitation to contradict President Biden's claim in summer 2021, as the Delta variant blew through vaccinated Americans, that vaccinated people cannot be hospitalized or die from COVID.

"We still to this day do not have data" on how many hospitalized Americans have been vaccinated, Walensky said – part of her pitch to Congress to fund "data highways" that would give the CDC standardized, real-time data from all jurisdictions.

McCormick questioned how well that money would be spent, given the "tens of billions" spent on electronic health record systems the CDC says it cannot read.

He appeared floored when Walensky didn't reject out of hand the "must-admit orders" used in states such as New York that sent COVID-positive patients back to nursing homes.

In a rare move for a Biden administration official, Walensky acknowledged the U.S. took a much more heavy-handed approach to COVID than some European countries with no worse results, without admitting it was overkill.

The CDC's updated guidance "effectively condoned" continued school closures "despite clear data" from reopened schools in Europe – and even Iowa – that showed children were poor spreaders and teachers were at no greater risk than other adults, said Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, an Iowa Republican and the state's former public health director.

Asked whether she had consulted pediatric journal research or data from Sweden or Iceland, Walensky said there were "not a lot of published data from Sweden" at the time but that research showed in-person Swedish schools had twice the teacher infection rate as remote schools. She also claimed "overwhelmed hospitals" convinced Sweden to close schools for older students.

Rep. Kweisi Mfume (D-Md.) scoffed at Republicans' affinity for COVID policies in Europe, which he said was not "apples to apples" with the U.S.

A page on the CDC website is still telling Americans to wear masks of any quality to slow COVID spread so "why aren't you and your staff wearing masks?" Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.) asked Walensky.

She responded that mask guidance depends on community hospitalization rates, but Lesko interjected that Walensky's supposed "context" was missing from the mask page she consulted.

Walensky invoked an in-house study from fall 2021 that found American counties without school mask mandates had about 18 more COVID cases per 100,000 than masked districts. Critics quickly noted the difference became negligible when Hoeg, the epidemiologist, extended the observation period and tripled the number of counties in the sample.

The director previously dismissed the significance of the multi-year Cochrane meta-review that found "little to no difference" from masking, because it relied on randomized controlled trials rather than the observational studies the CDC favors.

HHS did not answer Just the News queries about its concerns with Walensky testifying. Neither the CDC nor HHS answered why Walensky cited the in-house mask study when Hoeg's more robust research contradicted it.