The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will soon undergo a restructuring, Director Rochelle Walensky announced to staff in an email Wednesday (August 17), according to multiple outlets.
“For 75 years, CDC and public health have been preparing for COVID-19, and in our big moment, our performance did not reliably meet expectations,” Walensky wrote in the email, which was sent to the agency’s more than 11,000 employees, reports STAT. “My goal is a new, public health action-oriented culture at CDC that emphasizes accountability, collaboration, communication, and timeliness.”
The Atlanta-based agency, whose mission includes protecting Americans from public health threats, has come under fire for repeated failures during the COVID-19 pandemic response, including distributing contaminated test kits and poor messaging early in the pandemic, and most recently, its ponderous response to the emergence of monkeypox. “We saw during COVID that CDC’s structures, frankly, weren’t designed to take in information, digest ...
