Crisis Leadership, Public Trust, and Vaccine Confidence: Walenksy’s CDC Response
Q&A with Rochelle Walenksy, MD, MPH
Dr. Rochelle Walensky served as the 19th Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2021-2023), Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School (2012-2021, 2025-present), and Chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases, Massachusetts General Hospital (2017-2021). Dr. Walensky is an infectious disease clinician whose research career is guided by a belief that the clinical and economic outcomes of medical decisions can be improved through the explicit articulation of choices, the systematic assembly of evidence, and the careful assessment of comparative costs and benefits.
Martin Goldstein: Dr. Walensky thank you for agreeing to this interview. What motivated you to leave your academic and clinical leadership roles at Harvard and Mass General to lead the CDC in January 2021, when the nation was experiencing record COVID-19 deaths — about 21,000 per week — along with widespread confusion about public health guidance, vaccine hesitancy, and eroding public trust?
Dr. Rochelle Walensky: I never expected to leave Harvard. I thought I’d spend my whole career there. I didn’t apply for this job — this wasn’t a matter of sending in a CV to see if I could run the CDC. It unfolded as the crisis in the country deepened — more and more people were dying. At MGH, I was leading efforts, speaking publicly about how to end the pandemic, and conducting research on vaccine rollout. Then, out of the blue, I got a phone call asking if I would consider the CDC role.
Throughout the process, I never knew where I stood — whether I was a top candidate or just one of many. I simply didn’t say no. Over time, it became clear that someone in government believed I was the right person for this moment. It felt like a call to serve. When you’re a medical resident, you carry what’s called “a code beeper.” When it goes off, you don’t stop to question whether to respond — you run to the code. That’s your duty: to help, to stop the bleeding. At that moment, the country felt like it was hemorrhaging. My national code beeper went off. And I knew my responsibility was to run.
Goldstein: When you became head of the CDC, you were confronted with an unapproved vaccine and the absence of a national distribution plan to achieve widespread uptake. Could you describe how you addressed the challenge of promoting public confidence in the COVID-19 vaccines, particularly given the politicized policy climate and pervasive misinformation?
Walensky: It was a striking moment for me because I had just published a Health Affairs paper emphasizing that the success of a vaccine depends not only on its efficacy but also on public confidence and the speed of rollout. Our research suggested that even a moderately effective vaccine could save more lives if it were widely accepted and rapidly distributed and administered. At the time, we were concerned that too little attention was being paid to trust and confidence, especially given how quickly this vaccine had been authorized. Suddenly, I found myself facing that challenge directly working with an authorized, not yet fully approved, vaccine and no established rollout plan. Securing the vaccine was a major scientific achievement, but the next urgent question was how to build trust, implement distribution, and reach hundreds of millions of people nationwide.
We began by assessing the situation we inherited and gradually identified the key pain points. Early on, we succeeded in quickly vaccinating a large share of those at highest risk — roughly 10% of the American population that is over the age of 70. Another priority was reopening schools, which were generally closed (~90%) when I started. Our first guidance focused on doing so safely, and we ensured that teachers were among the earliest group eligible for vaccination. Throughout, we worked hard to balance protection of individuals while protecting the most essential parts of society
Frontline workers, teachers, older adults and immunocompromised were among those most vulnerable to severe illness. Early on, we also began seeing entire communities being left behind. As mass vaccination sites — often large venues run by the National Guard — were set up across the country, we used social vulnerability indices to decide where they should go. Our goal was to place these sites in the communities most at risk, ensuring that people who had the least access to the vaccine could receive it quickly and safely.
That was one of our strategies. Through the Federal Retail Pharmacy Program, we expanded vaccine access nationwide by partnering with large pharmacy chains like CVS, Walgreens, and Rite Aid, as well as smaller local pharmacies. We also worked closely with nursing homes, long-term care facilities, and group homes to protect those at highest risk.
We focused on ensuring people could access vaccines close to home, especially in communities with the greatest need. Early challenges centered on determining optimal vaccine placement. Over time, the priority shifted toward building public confidence in the vaccine — once the willing population was served, the question became how to reach those who were unsure. This meant engaging what we call the “movable middle,” the group that might consider vaccination with the right information and support.
Goldstein: How does the CDC plan to translate its 'gold standard science' into plain language and relatable narratives so that people without technical expertise — or even without a high school science background — can understand, while also conveying the uncertainties and evolving nature of science?
Walensky: That’s a big question. First, I should say I no longer speak for the CDC. It’s a different organization today than when I joined — and when I left. Many outstanding subject matter experts remain, but many others have moved on, and the leadership has changed.
If we look back to 2018 or 2019, most Americans didn’t think much about what the CDC actually did. For decades, its role was to monitor outbreaks and tell the public what actions to take. You might have heard its alerts — don’t eat the chicken fingers when they are linked to a salmonella outbreak, or don’t eat the raspberries linked to a cyclospora outbreak or national warning on increasing opioid deaths — recommendations about flu shots or tobacco cessation — but most people recognized the message, not necessarily the messenger.
As an infectious disease doctor, I’ve always followed CDC work closely, but for the broader public, it was largely in the background. Then came COVID-19 — an event unlike anything in the agency’s 70-plus-year history. For the first time, every American was at risk at once, and CDC’s communication role suddenly expanded. During my tenure, it became clear that our audience was no longer just health professionals but millions of parents, teachers, and families looking directly to the CDC – literally coming to our website to read our school guidance on how to stay safe.
That was a new experience for us, and we had to evolve quickly. We realized we needed to create guidance not just for subject matter experts, but also for the American public — written in language everyone could understand. While I was at CDC, we had more than 200,000 webpages, and a major focus was reconciling and
standardizing the information across them so people could easily find what they needed. That effort shaped how we rethought communication: making the agency’s “front door” more accessible and speaking to broader, more diverse audiences than ever before. The websites have since changed, but the shift toward clearer, more inclusive communication was an essential part of that evolution.
Goldstein: Given your experience, the lessons learned of having to communicate to different audiences in different ways, what advice would you give to the agency going forward with respect to communication?
Walensky: I hope the agency remains open to this advice. One of our key responsibilities was not only to produce clear, streamlined guidance but also to adapt it for very different local realities. After 25 years in academia at Harvard — a place rich in ideas but often siloed — I gained a new perspective at CDC by visiting places I had never seen before: a rural hospital in Alaska, a public health department in Hawaii, and a local tribe in New Mexico. Traveling across the country taught me that every community interprets guidance differently and faces unique limits in what it can do. Our role, then, was to define the gold standard while also offering practical next-best options for those without the capacity to reach that gold standard. In this beautiful country as diverse as ours, public health guidance can never be one-size-fits-all.
I believe it’s important to offer realistic alternatives — ways to say, “If this approach won’t work in your community, try this instead.” That’s a harm reduction mindset. From a clinical perspective, it’s like telling a patient who smokes: if quitting entirely feels impossible, start by cutting from twenty cigarettes a day to fifteen, and replace the rest with something like pretzel sticks. Approaching it this way keeps people engaged and coming back, whereas demanding complete change all at once might mean you never see them again.
Goldstein: In August 2022, you openly criticized the CDC’s pandemic response, saying it “failed to respond quickly enough,” that public trust had been damaged, and others claimed the agency had bent to political pressures such as school reopenings. You concluded it was clear that “it is time for the CDC to change.” Looking back, what structural and operational reforms did you view as most urgent, and how did your leadership guide the decisions and actions that followed?
Walensky: Let me reframe your question. We set out to take a full 360-degree look at our work, which I believed was essential. This wasn’t about listing all the things CDC did well — though there were many. During my tenure, we administered 700 million vaccines, something the agency had never accomplished before. At the same time, we recognized that to rebuild trust, we had to look honestly at ourselves. We needed to acknowledge that, despite unprecedented achievements, we didn’t do everything perfectly. Taking that mirror up meant asking: Where did we fall short? What can we do better next time?
Communication was one major challenge. We needed to make guidance that was both clear and easy to put into practice, and we needed a workforce ready to respond immediately.
During the pandemic, CDC had about 12,000 employees and roughly the same number of contractors. At the height of the response, around 2,500 people — about 20% of the agency — were deployed to outbreak work. When staff are deployed, they step away from their regular duties, which leaves critical programs — like maternal mortality surveillance — understaffed. That strain makes it harder to maintain ongoing commitments while responding to emergencies.
Deployment also requires the right expertise at the right place and time. For example, when a school COVID outbreak occurs, CDC must send disease detectives on-site quickly — ideally with the language skills and cultural understanding needed for that community. We realized that we hadn’t fully mapped our staff’s skill sets to deployment needs, so we began building that capability.
A good example came during the Ebola outbreak in Equatorial Guinea — the only Spanish-speaking country in Africa. We needed someone with expertise in viral hemorrhagic fevers, a diagnostic laboratorian, and a fluent Spanish speaker who could deploy immediately. That unique set of expertise underscored how essential it is to align expertise, language, and readiness for global response.
Developing this mapping was essential to fulfilling our responsibility both globally and locally. We needed team members who could work directly with communities — especially those disproportionately affected by diabetes or disability — while also supporting COVID-19 detection and other public health efforts. Addressing workforce challenges was a central part of our work.
Goldstein: With a proposed 50% cut to CDC’s budget in 2026, and already 25% of the staff reduced, how should CDC reset its priorities to maximize impact under such constraints?
Walensky: First, we need to recognize — even before this time — that CDC itself has been chronically underfunded to do the things that America expects of it. Many people asked, why did you go to UK and Israel for data on vaccine effectiveness? That is because our data systems are not modernized and integrated. We embarked on a data modernization effort when we received data from X county and Y state, that it was actually in the same format as the data from A county and B state. That doesn't happen. We were still receiving data on COVID by fax machine in 2020. That’s just not how public health in the 21st century should be done.
Over the past 5-7 years, our data modernization effort has focused on strengthening CDC’s data systems. The agency has received about $900 million — significant, but modest given the scale of need. We used those funds strategically to expand electronic case reporting and improve interoperability so state systems could communicate with each other and with the federal systems.
To put this in perspective: a single large county health department could easily require a budget of that size to modernize its data system. Mass General Brigham spent $1.2 billion just to implement, Epic, its own electronic health record system. CDC received less than that to modernize data systems for the entire country.
What do we do with the budget when the future of public health hangs in the balance? Much of the time and effort I dedicated during my appearances before Congress focused on exposing the frailty of our public health infrastructure. We discussed workforce, data systems, and laboratory capacities, emphasizing that investing in those core elements — especially when tomorrow’s threat is unknown — provides the foundation to address potential challenges, whether that means Oropouche, Zika, H1N1, or H5N1. With the investment in a strong infrastructure in place, we are equipped to handle whatever comes our way. Now fast forward to today, where the conversation has shifted to cuts.
One of the hardest challenges for any health agency — especially a public health agency — is to prove the counterfactual: how do you know what would have happened if not for the fact that public health was working? Many of CDC’s greatest successes are invisible precisely because nothing happened — and that is the true gift of public health.
But when public health is weakened and funding is cut, those “non‑events” begin to reappear as avoidable tragedies. We are already seeing this with measles outbreaks and pertussis outbreaks. During my tenure, there was even a case of paralytic polio in an under‑vaccinated community. These are stark reminders of what happens when preventive systems erode.
For decades, public health has quietly protected communities by stopping outbreaks before they spread. As budgets decline, that protective shield disappears, and events that should never happen will happen again. This is why strong, bipartisan support and community engagement is so vital. Approximately seventy percent of CDC’s budget goes directly to states, which means that any member of Congress voting to cut CDC’s budget is, in effect, cutting funding to their own state. The consequences of those cuts are already becoming visible — and they will only grow more severe if they continue.
Goldstein: You have cautioned that we are beginning to see outcomes that should never have been allowed to occur. From your perspective as a former CDC Director, is there a way to reset the agency’s priorities to prevent such outcomes in the future? Given your unique vantage point in having led the organization, understood its limitations, and grappled with its challenges, what guidance would you offer on how the CDC should align its mission and resources going forward?
Walensky: We must protect key long-term/longitudinal surveys, data systems, and surveillance networks, because rebuilding them would be difficult. One critical example is our vaccine effectiveness platforms. In the U.S., without an integrated health system, vaccination effectiveness and some safety data are retained in public health departments while hospitalization data is in electronic health records. They are not linked, making it impossible to know who is both vaccinated and hospitalized. To evaluate flu vaccine performance each year, we rely on dozens of sites nationwide that are willing to connect those datasets. Those platforms already exist
Eliminating those contracts and losing that expertise means we'll eventually have to rebuild or create integrated data systems. We're still many years and billions of dollars away from achieving that integration, which is essential for demonstrating vaccine effectiveness and safety. Some of these capabilities are things we urgently need.
There are some critical systems we must protect — particularly surveillance platforms, for example, like those that monitor food safety. While it’s true that there was some excess, as many federal agencies would admit, the problem is that the cuts were made in ways that were not strategic or thoughtful for public health. This has led to a major loss of expertise, which poses serious challenges. These systems can be rebuilt, and potentially improved, and there are experts already thinking about what that future should look like. The question is how long recovery will take after this period of disruption.
Goldstein: Polling shows trust in physicians, hospitals, and the CDC has fallen sharply since the pandemic, with only 57% of Americans now trusting the CDC for reliable vaccine information, down from over 80% in 2020. Given this erosion of confidence and the politicization of public health, what steps would you take —drawing on lessons learned — to ensure transparent communication, rebuild relationships with local and state health leaders, and advance organizational or cultural reforms at the CDC that reassure Americans the agency is agile, responsive, and willing to learn from past mistakes?
Walensky: To build trust, you need accountability, reliability, and a genuine understanding of community. When I first came to the agency, one of the major challenges was that the agency itself had become the news. Headlines focused on CDC failures — “CDC messed up the test,” “the CDC is in turmoil,” or “no one trusts the CDC.” I’ll add that I don’t think this problem is unique to CDC. People have lost trust in government more broadly; they don’t trust Congress either. In fact, I believe CDC still polls higher than Congress — it’s a low bar.
I'm not saying the situation is ideal. Blaming the CDC alone misses the real issue. The deeper problem is that many people no longer trust science or scientific institutions — and there have been active efforts to erode that trust. There is certainly important work to do in rebuilding confidence, and I would welcome the opportunity to be part of that effort.
This is, at its core, a societal problem. The CDC cannot solve it on its own, nor does it have a dedicated budget for all of the efforts necessary to rebuild that public trust. The challenge goes far beyond any single agency; it reflects a broader societal campaign that has undermined both science and expertise.
One of the key things I did to help rebuild trust was to emphasize accountability. I believed it was important to hold up a mirror to ourselves — to review where we were accountable and where we had improved. I also felt strongly that true trust would return when CDC was no longer the subject of daily headlines. By the end of my tenure, I think we were successful at that. The CDC had moved out of the news cycle and back to doing what it was meant to do: reporting the science that informs and protects the American public.
When I began at CDC, one of the challenges I faced was that some of the information on our website had not been written or approved by our subject matter experts. To address that, I asked my deputy director, Anne Schuchat, to comb through the website and remove all content that had been posted by the administration rather than by CDC experts. We did that work carefully and thoroughly. Unfortunately, that situation appears to be recurring now. There is an active effort to undermine the CDC by blurring the line between the agency’s scientific experts — who have devoted their careers to public health — and the public-facing “banner” of the CDC, which this administration is again using to post material not approved by subject matter experts. Untangling those two will be difficult, but it is essential work that must happen once more.
Goldstein: Public trust in health recommendations has been eroded by political polarization. When scientific guidance is framed through a partisan lens, it distorts messaging, fuels misinformation, and makes evidence-based choices appear political. The result is weakened support for public health measures and slower, less effective responses to threats. At a time when confidence in institutions like the CDC is strained, rebuilding bipartisan trust is urgent. Considering recent partisan pressures and leadership transitions at the CDC, what strategies can best reinforce the agency’s scientific independence and safeguard its role as a trusted source?
Walensky: I don’t think current leadership is focused on that question — though I believe it should be. Right now, the people and activities commanding attention aren’t necessarily working toward that goal, and until someone does, progress will be difficult. There’s a tremendous amount of evidence-based science available, and the right buzzwords — transparency, public accountability, gold-standard science — are everywhere. But when people are asked to show the actual “gold standard” science, what’s often presented is an unpublished study, an unreviewed analysis, or something that doesn’t truly meet that standard.
Some people have begun turning to what might be called “alternative science” — smaller case studies, anecdotal reports, unpublished white papers, rather than large-scale cohort or observational studies involving hundreds-of-thousands of participants. I hesitate, though, because I’m not sure that in the current climate we’re always able to rely on rigorous, large-scale evidence the way we once did.
That said, I want to underscore one fundamental point. I had the privilege of leading an agency deeply committed to health and public health, and I remain very proud of the work we accomplished there. We were one voice at a very large policy table, where politics and policy constantly intersect. It’s important to recognize that not everyone believes health should be society’s top priority — and that, ultimately, is a matter of values.
I’m reminded of an anecdote from Massachusetts during the early days of the pandemic, before vaccines were available. The goal then — and this was before vaccines were available — was to reopen schools safely, including after-school activities like wrestling. Wrestlers insisted they would remove their masks during matches — arguing the matches would be shortened to two or three minutes to limit face-to-face exposure. From a public health standpoint, it sounded like a terrible COVID strategy. But then a mother stood up and said, “If my kid doesn’t wrestle, he’s not going to college.” That moment captured the profound tension between health priorities and other deeply held values in our communities. We cannot lose sight of that.
That experience was eye-opening for me. It made me realize that, for me, health is among the most important priorities — and I suspect you value health highly too — but that in deciding what is best for a child, many parents might rightfully place education at the top, or see it as equally important. This was one of those moments when it became clear that policy decisions — especially health policy decisions — touch many aspects of life, and we must be acutely sensitive to that complexity. During my time at the CDC and throughout the pandemic, I learned that considerations extend far beyond health to include the economy, education, finances, commerce, global travel and more. While I often had a seat at the table on these issues, I also saw that, in areas where the evidence is not black-and-white but gray, flexibility is essential. You have to be prepared to adapt and move accordingly.
Goldstein: How can federal health leaders work to bridge political divides and ensure that when scientific recommendations become politicized, health institutions can communicate with broad credibility and are met with credibility rather than gridlock?
Walensky: You have to sit at the table — you have to be part of the conversation. But first, we need to recognize that there’s a real destination to reach. Too often, people get stuck in the initial reaction — obviously you’re not going to wrestle — thinking, “Well, obviously that’s a terrible idea,” and stopping there. The key is to be willing to listen and look without judgment or preconceived notions.
When I was at the CDC, I joined weekly meetings with the National Governors Association and got to know many governors across the country. Some were remarkably effective at working across party lines to get their communities vaccinated. I would often call those governors and say, “I’m clearly not the right spokesperson for your community, but you’re doing a great job. Could you help in another community that’s struggling — where I’m not the right messenger, you might be?”
The goal was to make those bridges — to recognize that the most trusted voices aren’t always the official ones. Even though the phrase “trusted messengers” may sound overused now, it still captures what matters most: identifying and supporting the people who can actually reach their communities.
Patience is essential. For example, while working in a Los Angeles community, I saw a vaccinator visit the same 7-Eleven daily for her morning coffee, always speaking to the attendant who had not yet received the vaccine. Each morning, she would gently ask, “What do you need to know? Is today the day? Are you interested?” It took about a month of respectful, repeated engagement before the attendant finally decided, “Today, I’m going to get vaccinated.” This approach demonstrates that sustained dialogue is effective; dismissing someone solely because they make a different choice closes the door to progress. Instead of focusing on disagreements, it helps to talk about the 90% of things we do agree on. We both want to stay healthy, even if we may not agree on every detail about how. By building on shared goals, trust grows and the chance for positive and collaborative health decision increases. As do our opportunities to bridge other divides.
Goldstein: The issue is about trust and communication. When scientific recommendations become politically charged, how can health institutions communicate in ways that build broad credibility and how mightCongress and state leaders support that mission?
Walensky: One key communication principle I learned — and that seasoned communicators often emphasize — is to be transparent: tell people what you know, tell them what you don’t know, explain what you’re going to do, outline what you want them to do, and acknowledge that circumstances will change, promising to stay in touch with updates. In some areas, I can now easily recognize where we might not have been consistent in following this approach. There was a strong desire to project certainty, to reassure the public that we had the situation under control and would “fix” things — even when certainty was thin. This tension became especially pronounced as we faced variant after variant, and as it became clear that our vaccines were not performing as well against subsequent strains as they had against the wildtype virus.
That was certainly a challenge, and I believe maintaining humility is essential. Communication is a field with its own expertise, and those of us in biomedical science still have much to learn from professionals who study communication science.
For example, at one point, a statement I made was misrepresented and shared as disinformation by someone on the far right. We had to decide how best to correct the record — whether by responding directly to that tweet, which risked amplifying it, or by posting a correction on my own account, where there was probably little audience overlap. In the end, we chose to retweet the original post to clarify the facts for the same audience who saw the disinformation. There is, in fact, a body of research that guides such choices, balancing the risks of amplification against the value of reaching those most exposed to the false claim.
Goldstein: Has the current CDC leadership contacted you for advice on the challenges they are facing, given your experience? Alternatively, have you reached out to offer your guidance to them?
Walensky: Historically, there has been consistent communication among CDC directors during transitions. I spoke with my predecessor when I began, and I spoke with my successor before I left. We have continued to stay in touch, which reflects the ongoing exchange of experience and perspective among former leaders. However, the agency now appears to be operating in a different era — one marked by new challenges and circumstances that shape how leadership transitions and collaboration occur.
Goldstein: Is this creating a recurring four-year pattern in which budget and staffing levels are reduced for several years and then increased again in the following cycle?
Walensky: Consider how challenging this constant change can be for the subject matter experts in the agency itself. With each new leadership transition, the organization must rapidly adjust to shifting policy priorities — often moving in entirely different directions from one administration to the next. This creates instability for the agency’s 12,000 professionals, who must stay focused on essential, day‑to‑day public health responsibilities while adapting to new expectations. Agency experts are skilled at realigning priorities without losing sight of core public health functions, but the repeated need to pivot can strain operations, effectiveness, and morale. During my tenure, my primary focus was guiding the agency through the pandemic, which meant maintaining operational consistency, supporting staff morale, and retaining critical talent to ensure readiness for both immediate and long-term public health needs.
During a particularly challenging time, one of the accomplishments I’m most proud of was being able to strengthen morale at the CDC, something that was reflected in our internal survey results. A key part of this involved making sure people knew their work was seen and valued. I started what I called the “unsung hero calls,” where each week I asked my senior leadership team to share the names of five individuals who had done something extraordinary that might otherwise go unnoticed. These were often field staff or specialists whose dedication made a real difference — people who, for example, rappelled from a helicopter to deliver COVID test kits to a cruise ship at sea, went door-to-door responding to the toxic fumes from the Ohio train derailment, or provided care to children arriving at the southern border. The goal was always simple: to reach out personally, say thank you, recognize their contribution, and remind them how much their efforts mattered to our mission. To let them know I see them, and I value deeply the work they are doing.
Goldstein: I would think that regardless of political orientation, stories like that would resonate with people across the spectrum. Do you think part of the problem is that CDC leadership hasn’t demonstrated that it truly values the work and dedication of its employees?
Walensky: What’s happening right now is that leadership is placing blame on the CDC. When it was said that I told the agency “CDC is to blame,” that wasn’t accurate. What I said was that the CDC needs to be accountable — not blamed — but committed to improving. We should be continuously striving to improve. We owe that to the American public, to the taxpayers.
That’s a very different tone from what’s coming out of the agency now, and I believe that difference in tone has contributed to some of the tension we’ve seen internally — for example, the incident where hundreds of rounds of ammunition were fired at the CDC offices.
I also want to be clear that I came into this role as a scientist, not a politician. I don’t care about which party is in charge. What matters to me is that whichever administration is leading, it is serving the best interests of public health.
Goldstein: One suggestion has been to split the CDC into two separate entities. What do you think about that idea, and do you believe it could be an effective way to address the current budget and staffing cuts going forward?
Walensky: You're asking about the infectious side and the noninfectious side of the agency’s work. Let me give three examples that show how they intersect and why both matter and work effectively together. During the Zika virus outbreak, for instance, the most feared effect was fetal anomalies in newborns. Those anomalies themselves weren’t infectious, but because CDC had expertise spanning infectious disease, vector-borne transmission, and fetal development, teams worked across disciplines to understand and address the full impact.
A second example came with the e-cigarette, or EVALI, outbreak. Researchers in tobacco control and electronic cigarettes are skilled in prevention and behavioral studies, but not typically in outbreak investigation. In that crisis, the CDC’s infectious disease outbreak investigators worked side by side with tobacco and lung injury experts to trace the source and identify causes.
We’ve seen this again and again — with COVID-19 and diabetes, for example — where the boundaries between infectious and chronic disease blur, and effective response depends on collaboration that bridges both fields.
We needed to integrate both the infectious and noninfectious sides of the agency so they could work seamlessly together in the same space, with mutual respect and understanding. Within the agency, these teams often bridge across disciplines. For example, one of our pediatricians who had worked extensively on COVID-19 vaccines later became our deputy director and chief medical officer, continuing to collaborate with colleagues in areas such as birth defects. This cross-agency collaboration allows experts to share knowledge and operate fluidly across divisions. While it’s technically possible to separate these functions, doing so would quickly reveal why keeping them integrated is far more effective.
Goldstein: Dr. Walensky, this has been a privilege. At a time of great challenge and change, there remains so much vital work to do. Thank you.
About the Author:
Martin H. Goldstein is a 2020 Harvard ALI Fellow and Managing Editor for the Social Impact Review. Martin has thirty plus years in biopharma, initially at Hoffmann-La Roche, followed by Genentech. Subsequently, as the founder and CEO of ViroLogic, Inc., a clinical laboratory guiding therapy of HIV-infected patients. More recently, he has been working with venture to build biotech companies pursuing cutting-edge science to develop therapeutics to treat disease.
This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.