Director of CDC says their response was botched

Give her credit for the admission.  Below the NY Times article and excerpts there's a short video worth watching if you care about the subject.

Here's the NY Times -

Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, on Wednesday delivered a sweeping rebuke of her agency’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, saying it had failed to respond quickly enough and needed to be overhauled.

“To be frank, we are responsible for some pretty dramatic, pretty public mistakes, from testing to data to communications,” she said in a video distributed to the agency’s roughly 11,000 employees.

Dr. Walensky said the C.D.C.’s future depended on whether it could absorb the lessons of the last few years, during which much of the public lost trust in the agency’s ability to handle a pandemic that has killed more than 1 million Americans. “This is our watershed moment. We must pivot,” she said.

Note last paragraph excerpted below. When you are a research scientist getting you name on multiple publications is a big deal - too big a deal.

A new executive team will be created to set priorities and make decisions about how to spend the agency’s annual $12 billion budget “with a bias toward public health impact,” according to a media briefing document. Two scientific divisions will now report directly to Dr. Walensky’s office, a move that appears aimed at speeding up delivery of data. Mary Wakefield, a former deputy health secretary in the Obama administration, was appointed to lead the reforms.

Dr. Walensky hopes to cut down the review time for urgently needed studies, emphasizing production of “data for action” as opposed to “data for publication,” the briefing document said.

In an interview, Dr. Walensky said that while “some of the data are messy, and some of the data take time, I’ve really tried hard to push data out when we had it.”

The agency aims to alter its promotion system so that it rewards employees’ efforts to make an impact on public health and focuses less on the number of scientific papers published.