A Critical Guidance to CDC Director, Rochelle Walensky: A Rational And Science Based Approach To Re-Establishing Trust In CDC’s Approach To The COVID-19 pandemic.
CDC director Walensky has failed to understand that her “one size fits all” approach to vaccine and “booster” mandates is irrational and dangerous to public health and to our democracy. She has also failed to focus the Biden administration’s “testing” efforts on IMMUNITY against COVID-19, instead promoting volatile and disruptive viral testing. Walensky’s deviation from science and lack of insight into the American psyche poses a risk to our nation.
Honorable Director Walensky,
It is increasingly clear that your agency has lost the trust of an increasing fraction of our democracy — right, center, and some on the left. This public mistrust of the CDC under your leadership is a danger to public health.
The fundamental reasons why this is happening, are: 1) your agency’s lack of insight, under your leadership, into the public’s ability to understand the problems we face and, 2) your deviation from “the science of Immunology”.
Under your directorship, CDC messaging has been disorganized, undisciplined and scientifically disingenuous.
But, it is still possible for you to fix this problem, at least partially, if you acquire the humility and introspection to listen with care.
At least 50% of America does not intrinsically accept and is uncomfortable with mandates, in general. In our nation, for any mandate or law to be comfortably followed, it must be rational and accommodating to special circumstances. Rigidity in created mandates only causes fracture and discord. But you and Biden administration have not understood this fundamental characteristic of a large swath of America.
Compliance requires adequate majority consensus — and if you do not achieve this, even if coercive means are used to compel the population into compliance, in the next iteration of our body politick, the democracy will react to disempower the coercive political force. Mr. Biden’s failure to understand this simple fact, and yours, will cause more damage to America’s political balance in the near future.
It is an undeniable fact that the most shocking part of the vaccine mandate structure emanating from the CDC has been the agency’s failure to actively accommodate clinically and ethically rational “off-ramps” to these mandates — specifically as it pertains to the millions of Americans with acquired immunity to COVID-19 from a prior infection, who have serological evidence of robust antigens-specific immunity.
The fact that CDC is allowing millions of already well immune Americans to undergo mandated vaccination, under threat of loss of educational or employment opportunities from private and state entities, is a critical Biden public health error.
Your rationale that there is a small marginal benefit to vaccinating such already immune persons, as the justification for imposing draconian mandates is a very serious threat to our democracy. Because it demonstrates a lack of insight into the American popular psyche by yourself and the rest of the Biden administration — not to mention an utter inability to see the epidmeiology.
I, for one, understand the source of this error of yours as being a result of your professional membership in an out of touch brand of Harvard academic medical experts, who does not appreciate that “perfect is the enemy of good” — and that algorithmic, “one-size-fits-all” medicine, harms and kills. But a vast proportion of the rest of America sees your cognitive error, not just as an error, but as nefarious intent towards the individual rights and autonomy of the American people. This dangerous negative sentiment is borne out of the your (and the Biden administration’s) failure to grasp that a gentle touch with velvet gloves, and persuasion not coercion, would convince far more Americans to willing comply with rational mandates. Alas, you’ve failed to see this simple reality.
Still, it is not too late to correct course.
With this message, I hope to guide you towards a more rational approach to the vaccine mandates. Here are three key step the CDC must take urgently to satisfy public dissent and re-earn trust:
- Guide American business and educational enterprises (as well as federal agencies) to formally relieve Americans with prior COVID-19 infection who are seropositive for COVID-19 antibodies from mandated vaccination.
- Guide American business and educational enterprises (as well as federal agencies) to formally relieve Americans with “hybrid immunity” (i.e., those with a natural infection AND two mandated COVID-19 vaccine shots) from mandated “booster” vaccination.
- Guide American business and educational enterprises (as well as federal agencies) to formally relieve Americans in whom a licensed physician has performed a serological evaluation and demonstrate robust immunity (i.e., from vaccine or prior infection) from any mandated vaccination.
Additionally, the CDC’s unwillingness to accept and inform the American people that IMMUNITY is the Achilles heel of this pandemic has deviated America’s fight against COVID-19 away from the science of Immunology. The illusion that “vaccination” is synonymous with IMMUNITY is your agency’s creation and a personal failure on your part as an academic physician and public health leader. The focus of America’s “screening tests” ought to be dominantly on determining who is immune and who is not — vaccinated or not!
Instead you’ve created this mad and dangerous rush for the volatile “viral testing”, in many places at “super-spreader testing centers”, where even if a person is uninfected at the time of testing, in the next moment they could become infected. This is demonstrative of your agency’s lack of scientific insight and your own out-of-touch public health leadership. You are not visualizing the reality on the ground well.
It is NOT a complex matter to have screened Americans for antibody immunity, as you well know — this metric is not only the medical gold standard for determination of resistance to diseases, it is also a far more durable and meaningful metric that the CDC’s frantic push to screen for the virus itself. Your failure to grasp this concept is a scientific lapse and leadership failure.
Still, it’s not too late to correct course: Dr. Walensky, focus American on screening for COVID-19 IMMUNITY — not volatile viral screening. Limit viral screening to the symptomatic and the high risk and generalize IMMUNITY screening instead.
It is unfortunate for me to be writing this letter to you. Because everything I’ve written here is quite self-evident to any reasonable and educated clinician of your caliber. But then, I trained Harvard, and I understood your kind of medical reasoning in a crucible created by the ignorant hubris of those in your class….Let me give you a message from a courageous woman clinician-scientist and Harvard faculty member, Dr. Amy Josephine Reed, who is now from another place: “One-size-fits-all approaches to medical practice erode trust, do harm and kill unsuspecting and trusting persons.”
Perhaps the recognition that you are failing at securing American public health or earning any real trust, will give you pause, humility and a bit of introspection to see the clear logic and simplicity of what I’ve expressed in this letter. When you respect rational dissent from the American democracy — and incorporate these into CDC guidance — instead of mindlessly allowing draconian mandates and dangerous “testing”, you might recover some trust.
I fear you will remain blind and deaf to this guidance, Dr. Walensky— for I have seen you and yours in action before and I know the consequences of your ethical blindness only too well.
Sincerely,
Hooman Noorchashm MD, PhD
Winter 2022.
