Walensky’s advice to next CDC director: ‘Keep your head down’

Rochelle Walensky, the outgoing director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), advised her soon-to-be successor Mandy Cohen to “keep your head down” as she prepares to assume the new role next month.

Walensky offered the guidance in an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution published on Monday.

Given the fraught political pushback Walensky encountered during her two-and-a-half years as head of the CDC, she was asked what she had to say to Cohen on navigating this environment.

“My advice to her would be to sort of keep your head down and recognize that the science has to be the foundation of what we deliver in health,” Walensky said. “Health does not happen in a vacuum. We have to consider at a policy level all of these other things that are happening.”

Walensky will be stepping down as CDC director at the end of June.

President Biden announced Cohen as his replacement for Walensky earlier this month. While coming into the role after a stint in the private sector, Cohen is no stranger to government work, having served in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services during the Obama administration and as North Carolina health secretary for five years.

In taking over for Walensky, Cohen is inheriting an agency that has fallen under heightened scrutiny due to its COVID-19 response, which was blasted for being hard to follow at times.

Throughout her tenure, Walensky dealt with criticisms from lawmakers opposed to the COVID-19 pandemic guidance her agency issued, as well as the rapidly changing nature of the recommendations. In response to this feedback, Walensky carried out a restructuring of the CDC beginning in 2022 that aimed to streamline communication.

The criticisms lobbed against her regarding COVID-19 kept up until the very end of her time at the CDC, with House Republicans grilling her earlier this month on the degree of influence outside groups had on the agency’s recommendations for reopening schools.

Having led the CDC through much of the coronavirus pandemic, the mpox outbreak of 2022, and an agency-wide reorganization, among other tasks, Walensky alluded to some weariness in her interview with the Journal-Constitution.

Speaking on leading the future of the CDC and its role as “both a science- and response-based agency,” Walensky told the newspaper, “It felt like it was time to provide that opportunity to somebody with renewed energy.”

She also said she looked forward to spending time with her family and reading books for pleasure, an activity that she says she hasn’t been able to do for “a long time.” When asked during the House hearing this month on her future plans, Walensky stated, “I don’t have plans after I step down.”