It’s time to take CDC chief Rochelle Walensky off the air

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention chief Rochelle Walensky just can’t stop spreading gloom and doom — needlessly. The White House needs to find a different voice for public-health pronouncements.

Take Tuesday’s warning that COVID may be “just a few mutations” away from being able “to evade our vaccine in terms of how it protects us from severe disease and death.” Fine, she prefaced that by saying it’s “the largest concern” of “we in public health and sciences” — but it should have come with the key context that this doomsday scenario is highly unlikely. Yes, viral mutations tend to make a bug more contagious, but they also tend to make it less deadly because it’s contra-survival for a virus to kill its host. That’s why today’s flu viruses are far less of an issue than their ancestor of 1918, which took tens of millions of lives over two years, as we noted Thursday.