(Center Square) – Members of Congress spoke to the director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday about the effectiveness of vaccines against COVID-19, whether the agency worked with social media companies to suppress speech and a number of other issues.
Dr. Rochelle Walensky, who is resigning from the agency at the end of the month, testified before the House Select Oversight Subcommittee on her agency’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
U.S. Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, the subcommittee’s chairman, questioned whether the science supported what the federal government claimed about the vaccine, specifically citing President Joe Biden’s statement, “if you’re vaccinated, you’re not going to get it. be hospitalized, you won’t be in the intensive care unit and you won’t die.”
Walensky responded by saying that at the time of Biden’s speech the vaccine was 96 percent effective in preventing symptoms of COVID-19, but that “in medicine, we never say never.” Wenstrup agreed but said Biden’s statement was so definitive that it qualified as misinformation.
Wenstrup told Walensky and the CDC that statements like this from these senior officials were inadmissible, suggesting that the people talking about the pandemic should have been doctors in the field rather than politicians or “someone in a lab “.
When pressed further, Walensky said the CDC at the time did not, and “still to this day, does not have data on people coming into hospitals who were vaccinated.” Wenstrup told him that the data around him had to be collected and examined closely.
U.S. Rep. Raul Ruiz, D-Ca., said the main point of the hearing was to increase preparedness for future pandemics “so we can respond more quickly in a future public health crisis.”
Walensky told the subcommittee that when he started at the CDC, fax machines were the primary mechanism for sharing data to and from the agency, preventing government and public health leaders from quickly accessing crucial information.
U.S. Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., who chairs the Oversight Committee, said the CDC flagged social media posts it deemed misinformation and asked, “Did the CDC work with private companies to influence the censorship of dissent on vaccines??”
Walensky declined to respond, saying the matter is under litigation.
Walensky also avoided answering whether the CDC had worked with Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, to censor posts.
His only comment was that the vaccine was the most important thing to get the United States out of the pandemic and that “it was very important that the American people understand how well they work and how safe they are.”
U.S. Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, R-Iowa, asked if the transmission rate in schools was low enough not to require school closures. Walensky responded by saying that after collecting data from schools in other countries that remained open and local transmission rates at schools, they encouraged schools to reopen on a case-by-case basis.
Walensky said one of the biggest things to note about the pandemic was the fact that there wasn’t, and still isn’t, an active infrastructure to get vaccines out in emergency situations.
Rep. Debbie Lesko, R-Ariz., commented on the lack of updates on the CDC website, focusing on the fact that the CDC still strongly recommends wearing masks without a contextual update on the page that sees the public
