“I think for a long time, C.D.C. has undervalued the importance of direct communication to the public with information the public can use,” said Dr. Richard E. Besser, who served as acting director of the agency during the Obama administration.
Dr. David Dowdy, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said messages to the general public need to be “very clear, very simple, very straightforward,” not framed for scientists. “I do think that culture is changing, but we need it to change faster,” he said.
Other planned changes are more bureaucratic but could have a big impact. A new executive team will be created to set priorities and make decisions about how to spend the agency’s annual $12 billion budget “with a bias toward public health impact,” according to a media briefing document. Two scientific divisions will now report directly to Dr. Walensky’s office, a move that appears aimed at speeding up delivery of data. Mary Wakefield, a former deputy health secretary in the Obama administration, was appointed to lead the reforms.
Dr. Walensky hopes to cut down the review time for urgently needed studies, emphasizing production of “data for action” as opposed to “data for publication,” the briefing document said.
In an interview, Dr. Walensky said that while “some of the data are messy, and some of the data take time, I’ve really tried hard to push data out when we had it.”
The agency aims to alter its promotion system so that it rewards employees’ efforts to make an impact on public health and focuses less on the number of scientific papers published.
Source Article from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/17/us/politics/cdc-rochelle-walensky-covid.html
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