NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE I n a recent New York Times op-ed, “What I Need to Tell America Before I Leave the CDC,” outgoing CDC director Rochelle Walensky defended her record as head of the beleaguered agency. While some of her assertions are undoubtedly true — the CDC is a vital institution that must rebuild the public trust it lost during the pandemic, preferably before another major threat arrives — Walensky clearly fails to grasp how the CDC squandered the public’s trust, and how her replacement can repair it. Nowhere is that clearer than in contrasting the CDC’s influence on schools during the pandemic with how Walensky now describes the CDC’s role.

In her essay, Walensky defends the CDC’s influence on extended 2020-21 school closures, writing that

the question of how low the rates of infections in schools need to be for them to remain open has much to do with whether you have an immunocompromised family member in the household, or whether you can supplement education with personal tutors or whether you require school lunches for your child’s nutritional needs.

Her reasoning betrays the CDC’s errant approach to this question. The question “What conditions are required for schools to reopen?” is very different from “What conditions are required for you to send your kids back to school?” The latter surely depends on the personal circumstances Walensky mentions, but the former should depend on whether most students and teachers can safely attend school — as nearly all schools offered remote options for families who needed them.

The CDC should have understood that it is a public-health agency issuing recommendations to the country, not a family doctor responding to individuals’ unique circumstances. Other countries understood this, and a number of states understood this, but the CDC did not. As a result, many schools stayed closed far longer than they needed to, which led to additional learning loss that will hinder a generation of students for decades.

This reflects a deeper error in how the CDC operated vis-à-vis schools during the pandemic, and why the CDC thinks we should nonetheless trust it. The CDC should aim, among other things, to provide medically informed and data-driven information that authorities need to make prudent policy decisions, such as when to reopen schools — or whether to close them at all. Our trust in the CDC is grounded in the information and rationale that its teams of scientists and public-health experts provide. Unfortunately, throughout the pandemic, the CDC prioritized recommendations over information, often providing scant rationales for its recommendations. Even worse, during the pandemic, the CDC often gave the impression that its advice was based on more than just science.

In February 2021, before the CDC released its 2021 school-reopening guidance, Walensky exchanged friendly text messages with Becky Pringle and Randi Weingarten, presidents of the nation’s two largest teachers’ unions. Weingarten complained to Walensky about the forthcoming guidance and that

we heard something from a NYT leak that seemed at odds with discussion. . . . Here is the language the NYT sent me “At any level of community transmission, all schools can provide in-person instruction (either full or hybrid), though [sic] strict adherence to mitigation strategies.”

Soon after, the CDC changed its recommendation from “all schools can provide in-person instruction” to a far weaker version: “All schools have options to provide in-person instruction.”

Regardless of whether Weingarten effected this change in the CDC guidance, Walensky should not have been consulting about it via text messages with heads of teachers’ unions in the first place. The CDC’s mission is not to appease teachers’ unions or other stakeholders. Indeed, it should not try to appease anyone as it does its job, which is to provide solid evidence and rationales to help state and local leaders make good policy decisions. As soon as the CDC starts appeasing this or that stakeholder, we have reason to doubt whether its guidance is truly evidence based.

The most egregious erosion of trust in the CDC probably stems from its masking guidance for schools, not only for its unpersuasive rationale, but because the CDC’s later masking guidance laid bare the errors of its initial mask mandates in schools. On February 25, 2022, the CDC replaced its guidance for 100 percent school masking — guidance that had been in place for all of that school year. Just four days later, Biden lauded the new CDC recommendation, triumphantly declaring in his State of the Union address that “under these new guidelines, most Americans in most of the country can now be mask-free.”

Wildly out of step with prior blanket guidance, the new CDC guidelines reduced the percentage of students attending schools with CDC-recommended mask mandates from 100 to 37 overnight. This whiplash did not result from a rapid shift in the scientific consensus on Covid; it came from linking masking recommendations to county-level data on local Covid risks — data that the CDC had been reporting for the entire school year.

Using that data for the months before CDC guidance shifted, my team at the American Enterprise Institute found that if the new, data-based guidance had been in place all year, the CDC would have recommended optional masking for 39 percent of students between September 2021 and February 2022, months where CDC instead recommended 100 percent masking. In short, the CDC’s own final guidance conclusively showed that its own prior guidance had been overwrought — confirming suspicions many had held about the objectivity of the agency’s guidance.

The CDC should be reminded: The question is not if there will be another public-health threat, but when. The CDC repeatedly fumbled on school policies affecting — and harming — millions of families. It needs to honestly acknowledge and analyze these failings if it is to have any hope of rebuilding public and congressional support, which will be vital in protecting us from future threats. Godspeed to the 20th CDC director, who has an incredible task before her.