‘The CDC alone can’t fix this’: Walensky calls for overhaul of U.S. public health system

Walensky said that the public health sector has lost 80,00 workers in the last 10 years and that health officials have tried to draw more attention to the issue. Tom Frieden, the agency's director under President Barack Obama, prioritized funding to improve how state public health offices received and analyzed laboratory reports. As public health officials left their jobs, the data-collection problems persisted.

Walensky thinks Covid-19 might be the catalyst for change.

Everyone wasn't touched by Ebola. Everyone didn't get the disease. People didn't always know what the CDC stood for during public health crises. People weren't talking about science on the nightly news. The last two years have seen the spread of the Pandemic. People have realized that we can't be in this place again.

Congress has allocated hundreds of millions of dollars to the CDC over the past two years, much of which the agency distributed to states to help improve their data systems and hire more staff to handle the workload. Walensky wants the CDC to do what he envisions. According to interviews with dozens of state public health officials, tens of billions of dollars are needed to rebuild just the nation's data systems and reporting processes.

You could try and get the system to work better by dumping money into it. You can't. You cannot create a workforce. She said that you have to upskill the workforce. We need to train it. Public health needs to be an attractive field to enter.

The CDC is under scrutiny.

Over the past two years, state public health offices have built data teams. Health offices were swamped with new lab reports when the Pandemic began. The public health offices were overwhelmed by the amount of results that flowed in. The contact-tracing efforts ended before the end of the first year because states failed to accurately detect and contain Covid-19.

In recent months, the CDC has come under fire from lawmakers on Capitol Hill and within the administration for its data, primarily the gaps that still exist two years into the Pandemic. Due to delayed reporting from overburdened state health agencies, the agency has struggled to report accurate vaccination, hospitalization and case information. Walensky told the Senate HELP Committee last week that the agency was six weeks behind in analyzing state Covid-19 data.

The data has to be perfect before a decision is made, and the CDC has a reputation of making sure every I is dotted, every T is crossed before a decision is made. Walensky said that we don't have that luxury in the Pandemic. It's too late if you wait for the perfect data to make a decision. Sometimes we need to make decisions in areas where the science is not clear.