WASHINGTON — Two days before Christmas, with the omicron variant driving a near-vertical rise in new coronavirus cases, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention alerted the White House that she planned to recommend that people infected with the virus isolate for five days instead of 10.
The director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, had faced previous criticism for issuing recommendations that confused the public and in some cases caught the White House off guard. Determined to avoid that this time, she briefed other top Biden health officials on her proposal so they would all be on the same page, according to two people familiar with her actions.
It did not work out that way. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert, and Dr. Vivek Murthy, the surgeon general, were concerned that the new guidance did not urge people to get a negative COVID test before ending their isolation. After the new recommendation became public, they both took issue with it on national television, saying they expected the CDC to clarify its advice.
On Wednesday, nine days after the guidance was issued and a day after it was slightly modified to include some advice on testing, the CDC was still having a hard time explaining itself. "How do you expect people to keep track of what they can and can't do?" a CNN reporter demanded of Walensky at a White House briefing.
It was a familiar refrain.
President Joe Biden came into office vowing to restore public trust in the CDC after the Trump White House had tied the agency's hands and manipulated its scientific judgments on the pandemic for political ends. Yet in his first year of battling the coronavirus, Biden has presided over a series of messaging failures that have followed a familiar pattern, with Walensky and her team making what experts say are largely sound decisions, but fumbling in communicating them to America.
Walensky, a highly regarded infectious disease expert from Boston with no prior government experience, insisted in February that schools must keep students 6 feet apart; in March, she said 3 feet was enough. She said in February that teachers did not need to be vaccinated to reopen schools; the White House said the next day that she was speaking "in her personal capacity."
In May, she said that vaccinated people generally did not need to wear masks in public, a sudden change that flummoxed state health officials. Two months later, she reversed that guidance after it was shown that vaccinated people could still transmit the virus.