After Wreaking COVID Havoc, CDC Director Walensky Announces June Departure

P. Gardner Goldsmith | May 7, 2023
DONATE
Text Audio
00:00 00:00
Font Size

 

 

At roughly the same time that England saw the coronation of its shiny new King Charles III, the United States got word that one of its princesses is going to step away from the federal crown, leaving with a lot of cash pocketed, a lot of lives and rights lost or ruined, and with the U.S. technocratic state even larger than it had been.

She is, of course, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, who might not be prepared to hand out all the tissues we sobbing Americans will need to dry our eyes when she leaves her “position of authority” at the end of June.

Chris Pandolfo reports for Fox News that Walensky informed the world of her decision via a letter, released to Joe Biden and the rest of us, and she was sure to use such handy euphemisms like the ever-popular political term, “moving forward” to fill some space:

"’The end of the COVID-19 public health emergency marks a tremendous transition for our country, for public health, and in my tenure as CDC Director,’ Walensky wrote in her resignation letter to President Biden. ‘I took on this role, at your request, with the goal of leaving behind the dark days of the pandemic and moving CDC — and public health — forward into a much better and more trusted place.’"

All of which offers nothing but blather and the reinforcement of certain assumptions that ought to give rise to timeless questions.

First, where did the feds get the moral or constitutional power to declare a “public health emergency”? When then-Secretary of Health and Human Services (and former head of pharma giant Eli-Lilly from 2012 to 2017) Alex Azar claimed that there was such a thing happening in January of 2020, why didn’t some folks in D.C. ask him where their U.S. Constitution not only granted him such magic power, but where the U.S. Constitution specifically allowed for the creation of his HHS?

And, one might ask Ms. Walensky, is it really appropriate to use the term “pandemic” for a virus with an overall survivability rate of 99.97 percent when taking in all cohorts? Might it be worthwhile to note that in May, 2009, the World Health Organization decreased the lethality threshold for what it called a “pandemic,” allowing its members, politicians, and the press, to engage in fear-mongering, calling the appearances of relatively less deadly pathogens “pandemics” when, in fact, they weren’t, according to the previous use of the term?

And, to cap off those questions, might one appropriately ask Ms. Walensky why she uses the term “public health” when logic and linguistics show anyone interested in looking at the term that it is meaningless, that “public health” doesn’t exist, because there is only individual health?

Is Walensky aware of the fact that the term “public” is simply another word for “group,” and that people never lose their status as individuals even when they are “grouped” under labels by the government – that to engage in threats against the rights of one in order to “help the health efforts” for the “group” puts every member of that “group” in danger of being victimized, thereby negating the argument that the government is protecting this mystical “group”?

Related: BLS Revises Job Growth Down for Every Prior Month This Year, Making April Look Better in Comparison

Ms. Walensky appears very pleased to sacrifice individual rights for the sake of the state, and she has shown herself to be more than eager to facilitate falsehoods during her two-year stint at this oppressive agency.

Lest we forget, Robby Soave reminds us at Reason that Walensky was not only the head of the Constitution-defying CDC, she energetically lifted the reins of greater “power” handed to her by Mr. Trump, Congress, and the Senate over such private matters as the right of landlords to evict deadbeat tenants.

“For instance, she repeatedly extended the CDC's eviction moratorium, a policy that made it extremely difficult for landlords to collect rent; the Supreme Court finally struck down the illegal order in August 2021.”

And then there was her laughable attempt to promote masking, when the real world had left her far, far behind:

“Walensky firmly believed that CDC guidance on COVID-19 policies should reflect the up-to-date scientific consensus—that is, unless the science had arrived at a conclusion that vexed her. Walensky's CDC put incredible faith in junk studies that purported to prove the importance of mask mandates in schools. When the legitimacy of these studies came into question, she declined to reverse course and admit that ritualistically masking schoolchildren was unnecessary. As late as February 2022, she still maintained that ‘masking should happen in all schools right now.’"

Of course, when faced with facts, the great COVID princess had a rhetorical “out”:

“When challenged on her policies, Walensky would demur and claim that CDC guidance on masks was just that—guidance. She sounded a similar note as COVID-19 adviser Anthony Fauci, who cloaked his enthusiasm for shutting down all of society under the guise of mere suggestion. The fact of the matter is that government policy makers at the local, state, and federal level routinely outsourced their COVID-19 decision-making to Walensky and Fauci. They put their thumbs on the scales of lockdowns and mask mandates, and thus the U.S. continued these policies far longer than did our peer countries. The World Health Organization (WHO), in contrast, never recommended masks for children under 6 at all, and many Nordic countries were unwilling to mask kids up to age 11.”

And Soave makes a couple more very good points.

First:

“Of course, Walensky wasn't necessarily looking to European peer countries for advice. She was far more inclined to celebrate the alleged success of China's ‘really strict lockdowns,’ which involved the country's authoritarian government starving some people via mandatory quarantine detention centers and trapping others inside burning buildings. (China eventually succumbed to the inevitable, gave up on its draconian lockdowns, and implicitly admitted that the "zero-COVID" policy was a fantasy.)”

Second:

“Walensky's CDC also pursued the questionable strategy of purging so-called misinformation about COVID-19 from social media. Throughout her time in charge, the CDC became the de facto internet speech police. Emails obtained by Reason show that Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, routinely deferred moderation decisions to government health authorities.

Meta might have thought it had little choice but to seek the CDC's input, as Biden had publicly declared that the social media platform's failure to suppress allegedly misleading content was ‘killing people.’ In any case, this is a dangerous precedent, and it represents a serious escalation in the federal bureaucracy's war on disfavored speech.”

And then there was Ms. Walensky’s bumbling, farcical, overly-enthusiastic promotion of mRNA injections, even as skeptics of their efficacy were proven right – a parade of appearances she made on complicit pop media that can be seen, in part, in a brief montage at the Twitter feed of the Vaccine Safety Research Foundation.

As we consider her departure, here are a few final questions:

Walensky will leave at the end of June. But will the CDC end? Will this $12 BILLION per year, 12,000 employee bureaucracy stop telling us what we can and cannot put into our own bodies, what supposedly is “safe and effective” even though they cannot be trusted and derive their funds from taxation, even as they apply their edicts on companies and play favorites along the way?

As a new monarch sits on the proverbial throne in England, can Americans see that the claims of CDC authority over our market decisions -- and the way it has revealed itself to be duplicitous in helping certain favored corporations game the so-called “regulatory” system – are as illegitimate and oppressive and deadly as the edicts of King George III and his accomplices in Parliament?

Walensky is leaving. Good riddance.

But the federal problem has grown under her reign.

Follow MRCTV on Twitter!

donate