CDC’s overcautious experts have themselves to blame for losing public trust

“My promise is that CDC will continue to follow the science as our guide,” Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told senators last week. While Walensky thinks the CDC already is doing that, the agency’s history of arbitrary, dubious and ever-changing advice about COVID-19 belies her boast.

Early in the pandemic, the CDC, together with the Food and Drug Administration, disastrously bungled the rollout of virus tests, making it impossible to curtail the spread of COVID-19 through contact tracing. Its obstruction of independently produced tests was coupled with irrationally narrow guidelines that initially recommended screening only for symptomatic travelers from China and people who had been in close contact with them. The CDC, which at first dismissed the idea that Americans should wear face masks in public places to curtail the spread of the coronavirus, later decided such coverings were “the most important, powerful public-health tool we have.” It even insisted that people who had been vaccinated should continue wearing face masks in many indoor and outdoor settings, both public and private.