BOSTON — It’s getting harder to trust guidance coming out of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, creating an opening for physician groups to step up and fill the void, two former top agency officials said on Wednesday.
Speaking at the STAT Summit, former CDC Director Rochelle Walensky and Dan Jernigan, the former director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, stopped short of saying they no longer trust the CDC. They said some information, like that on maternal health, foodborne illnesses, and international travel, appears to remain reliable.
The remarks from Walensky and Jernigan point to the ongoing fracturing and loss of trust in the public health infrastructure in the U.S. Already, several independent efforts to evaluate and recommend vaccines have cropped up, and a group of Democratic governors are forming their own public health group.
“If [states] can’t trust what’s on the CDC website, then we’re having a significant impact on what happens at the local level, where people actually engage with public health, and that is something that we don’t want to see,” Jernigan said.
Walensky, who ran the agency under former President Biden, has previously said that people should be cautious of information on the CDC website, but not write it off entirely.
“What I can say is, the vaccine information on the CDC is not necessarily that of the subject matter experts or the CDC, but there’s a lot of other great information on this CDC website that I don’t believe has been tainted with as of yet,” she said in September during a media briefing.
At Wednesday’s event, she and Jernigan said that information coming out of the CDC on some issues, like vaccines, may not be well-grounded in science, and suggested that professional medical organizations must fill the gaps. The agency has faced drastic cuts and reorganization under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
“Was it something that was an agenda driven ideology?” Jernigan said, of trying to vet vaccine information on the CDC website.
Since becoming the head of HHS, Kennedy has taken aggressive steps to change the ways federal health agencies review, approve, and authorize vaccines. Many of those impacts have been felt at the CDC, where Kennedy dismissed a panel of federal vaccine advisers and refilled it with his handpicked choices, including people with vaccine skeptical views.
The CDC has also been decimated by numerous rounds of firings that have shrunk the number of subject matter experts on areas like vaccines.
A recent KFF poll found that about half of the public say they have a “great amount” or a “fair amount” of trust in the CDC to provide reliable information about vaccines, the lowest level of trust since the beginning of the pandemic. People’s own health care providers are the most trusted source of vaccine information, the poll found.
Jernigan, who resigned from the CDC alongside other senior leaders in August, after Kennedy ousted former director Susan Monarez over vaccine policy, said it’s time for professional medical organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, to step up to the plate to provide its own recommendations on vaccines. The AAP has already issued its own guidance on vaccines for children that differs from federal guidelines.
Walensky also pointed to the Vaccine Integrity Project out of the University of Minnesota, which she said is reviewing evidence on vaccines that would typically be reviewed by CDC and helping providers make sense of it.
“A team of scientists have gotten together to review the data from the last ACIP meeting,” she said. She added that the group would make its work public, as not all providers or state and local officials have the time to comb through hundreds of pages to make recommendations.
“That is transparency,” she said.
Others have also urged clinicians to rise to the occasion and make more of an effort to combat misinformation and become trusted sources.
“The more [physicians] are viewed as people, not experts all the time, I think the more effective they will be in having a message,” Mike Varshavski, a family physician and influencer known as Dr. Mike said at the STAT Summit on Wednesday.
“There is a way to make science enjoyable, and make it not seem boring, and I think we have to invest in that,” he added.
The comments came on the same day that 15 Democratic governors announced a nonprofit coalition to provide alternative sources of public health information.
“We can no longer rely on the information coming out of Washington, D.C., but our states are coming together to unequivocally state that science still matters,” Washington State Governor Bob Ferguson said in a statement.
