Rochelle Walensky’s Terrible Testimony
Michael Senger. Feb. 17, 20231/2
Last week, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky gave testimony to Congress that was jaw-dropping even by the abysmal standards to which we’ve been accustomed during COVID.
In just a few hours, Walensky managed to tell Congress that
the CDC’s guidance to mandate masks in schools would never change regardless of new evidence,
that the CDC had conducted no randomized controlled trials (RCTs) as to whether masks were effective because it was so obvious that they worked, and
that COVID vaccines had been added to the child immunization schedule so they could be given to uninsured children.
First, in light of the recent Cochrane review including 78 peer-reviewed RCTs with over 600,000 participants concluding masks made “little to no difference” in preventing COVID or flu, Walensky told Rep. Cathy Rodgers that the CDC’s guidance to mandate masks in schools would “not change with time” regardless of the new evidence.
Walensky’s response is astonishing for several reasons. First, to say that the CDC’s masking guidance “does not change with time,” despite the recent Cochrane review, is effectively to admit that the CDC’s guidance does not change with new data or evidence, either. This is a far cry from the commitment to “science” which the American people had long been told they were following.
If that’s not bad enough, Walensky’s statement is, of course, also flatly untrue. After discouraging Americans from obtaining facemasks in the initial weeks of COVID, the CDC made an abrupt about-face in April 2020, and facemasks soon became mandatory for day-to-day activities, which the CDC at the time had attributed to a change in “science.” Making all this even more horrific is the fact that the United States stands out conspicuously as the only developed nation in which its national public health agency recommends masking children as young as two years old.
Next, Walensky goes on to tell Rep. Gary Palmer that no one in the US federal government would have thought to propose an RCT to determine if masks were effective because “there wasn’t equipoise to the question anymore.”
Effectively, Walensky is saying that the CDC wouldn’t consider conducting an RCT, widely considered the “gold standard” of evidence-based medicine, because it was so obvious that masks worked. It’s unclear if Walensky’s butchering of the word “equipoise” was simply a result of her trying to use a big word in order to sound scientific. But if taken literally, the actual meaning is even worse: To say there was no “equipoise” to the question is to say that conducting an RCT to determine if masks worked would have been a violation of research ethics.
Finally, Walensky tells Rep. Dan Crenshaw that the only reason COVID mRNA vaccines had been added to the routinepediatric immunization schedule for all children over six months old was so that they could be given to uninsured children.
''(This sounds evil, so are they getting rid of poor people snd their children?)''
https://brownstone.org/articles/rochelle-walenskys-terrible-testimony/