No one in America is surprised to learn that Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky is sending mixed messages about the COVID pandemic. That’s been the government’s M.O. from day one.
What might surprise people, though, is to hear NBC News call out her and her agency’s ongoing failure to deliver consistent news, policy, and protocol for the virus — from vaccines to masks to quarantines — and to ask her why Americans should bother to trust anything she says.
But it finally happened.
On Wednesday, after recent stories on the agency’s new-and-improved quarantine standards for COVID-positive people as well as its screw-up in estimating the prevalence of the Omicron variant, NBC’s Peter Alexander pressed Walensky on the CDC’s repeated (and ongoing) inconsistency and “mixed messaging” on COVID info and standards.
Also noting the agency’s flip-flops on masks and boosters, Alexander asked the director, “Why should Americans trust the CDC?”
Her answer, not surprisingly, was less than helpful.
“My job right now is to take all the science and the information that we have and to deliver guidance and recommendations to the American people that is adapted to the science at hand,” Walensky said. “This pandemic has given us a lot of new and updated science over the last two years, and it is my job to convey that science through those recommendations and that is exactly what we’re doing.”
(H/T: Fox News)