LOS ANGELES (KNX) – When it comes to looking back on the last three years of the pandemic, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, tells KNX News it’s important to remember the millions of lives lost.
“I think all too many times over the last two and a half years, we have seen that tally and it’s been a tally and we need to pause and recognize that these are lives lost. People who will not see their children get married, their siblings…it’s tragic,” she said.
Another lesson Dr. Walensky learned, she said, was the “frail, underfunded public health infrastructure” in the United States.
“The fact that we don’t have a public health workforce across the country – and I don’t mean just at the CDC –that was equipped to handle an epidemic, a pandemic of this size. Our data systems that were not equipped to handle data coming in, reportable diseases coming to the CDC at a million cases a day,” she noted.
“A laboratory system that was not state-of-the-art across the country that was equipped to handle what needed to be done for genomic surveillance or wastewater surveillance or whatever it may be.
So, I think the important thing that we need to do is never be in this position again…”
The biggest lesson, or “the one message” Dr. Walensky believes comes out of this pandemic is the importance of getting vaccinated and boosted.
When it comes to the vaccines, Dr.
Walensky noted the evolution of the science of the vaccines, as “scientific humility.”
“We need to understand that things can change, and it has been one of the real challenges in the communication about (the vaccines),” she said. “And yet, here we are in this moment that we have this gift of a scientific delivery of a vaccine in a relatively short period of time that does protect people from being in a hospital, that does protect against death and so that’s what we really need to keep our eye on.”
Listen to Dr. Walensky’s full interview with KNX by clicking on the audio above.
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