CDC's Walensky won't admit illegals spreading COVID at border; promises 'guidelines' someday
The more CDC director Rochelle Walensky talks, the worse she sounds.
Along with her well noted controversial statements about returning to mask-wearing and a nationally mandated COVID vaccine, the latter of which she walked back to some extent, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director threw out other nutty statements that are worth noting — if for nothing else, then the fact that Joe Biden says he defers to her and her continuously mistaken bureaucrats at CDC.
Breitbart News reported that a question about illegal border-crossers spreading COVID, from Fox News's Bret Baier, triggered this exchange:
Baier said, "But do you know the surge, how the surge of illegal immigrants with COVID is affecting the overall rate, you know, it sounds like the percentages down there on the border are astronomical?"
Walensky said, "Yeah, you know, I would say that the percentages in the southern part of this country are really quite high. I don't necessarily think we can attribute all of that to what's going on at the southern border. I think what we really need to do is spend our time getting our communities vaccinated to getting our individuals vaccinated to prevent disease from transmitting in our communities."
Basically, she was attempting to brush off the obvious problem of unvetted illegal aliens coming into the U.S. and spreading COVID throughout the country. With the U.S. paying for their tickets, either by airplane or bus, to their choice of destinations, it's pretty obvious that a disease vector, courtesy of the Biden administration, is in place. During the Trump administration, that avenue of spread was shut down firmly through Title 42, throwing illegal migrants back on COVID concerns, based on protecting the country.
These days, there's nonsense like this going on:
Baier said, "One woman wrote in, My in-laws live in Austria, they cannot come here to see their six-month-old baby because of the EU travel band even as migrants come across the southern border from other countries with more COVID and worse vaccine performance and they are allowed in. Is that a problem, Dr. Walensky?
Walensky said, "We're working, um, at the CDC to provide technical assistance for all areas of travel as well as to provide technical assistance at the southern border. So as people come in, we are keeping migrants, as well as those communities, as safe as possible with the technical assistance and infection prevention guidelines from the CDC."
There are also tweets like these being passed around:
Fully vaccinated Canadians can’t come to America. American citizens in Mexico can’t come back unless they are tested. But 1,400,000 illegals 50,000 from around the world not the Americas in June are allowed in.
— James Jay Carafano (@JJCarafano) July 30, 2021
[Note: That latter number is likely far higher.]
The contradictions are pretty amazing here.
What's more, Walensky's claim to be ready to send "guidelines" is something she's been talking about for months, but somehow has never gotten around to doing. Here she was back in February, according to ABC News, promising all those migrant guidelines:
The CDC, in a three-paragraph order signed by its director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, on Feb. 11, exempted unaccompanied children from being expelled to Mexico until "a forthcoming public health reassessment," which has yet to be published.
Here's what's happened since, from NBC News three days ago:
WASHINGTON — Two more whistleblowers have come forward to allege that children were mistreated by contractors and senior federal employee managers at a Department Health and Human Services migrant shelter in Fort Bliss, Texas, earlier this year, and also say HHS told them to downplay hundreds of Covid infections among children held at the facility.
"Covid was widespread among children and eventually spread to many employees. Hundreds of children contracted Covid in the overcrowded conditions. Adequate masks were not consistently provided to children, nor was their use consistently enforced," the whistleblowers, Arthur Pearlstein and Lauren Reinhold, said in a federal whistleblower complaint filed Wednesday[.]
But at the end of their service, they said, federal detailees were regularly given written instructions from HHS public affairs that told them, "when asked, to make everything sound positive about the Fort Bliss experience and to play down anything negative."
And she's still brushing off that child migrants (many of whom reportedly catch COVID in U.S. detention centers before being dispersed through the U.S.) are spreading COVID? And she's still working on her "guidelines"? Perhaps it's because she's making so many television appearances that she can't get around to doing her actual $188,063-salaried job. Or perhaps she takes Kamala Harris as her role model, hoping to best her on the border-laziness front.
In addition, Walensky hasn't done anything about Title 42, which the Biden administration says it's awaiting word from her on as a million migrants stream in:
The Department of Homeland Security declined to comment on the future of Title 42. A White House official said the lifting of Title 42 had never been planned.
"That decision will rest with the CDC and that public health process — as of right now there is no change in policy in Title 42, nor a timeline to preview or announce when it's no longer needed," the official said.
That's the current in-place guideline to throw back illegal migrants on COVID grounds. Joe Biden said he was going to lift it but then said it was up to Dr. Walensky to make that decision. Rather than affirmatively advise that it should stay in place based on all the migrant COVID-spreading, she's actually said nothing, and Biden, being Biden, is supposedly leaving it in place but not enforcing it, based on the kinds of statistics around open borders and migrant COVID-spreading that we are seeing now. Words, and rules, no longer have meaning to Biden, and she's letting this go on and on as COVID spreads through the U.S.
As if that weren't bad enough, she's back to nonsense about everyone masking up, and all she needs is two weeks to "stop the spread."
Heard that one before? How stupid does she think the public is?
As the New York Post notes in its fierce editorial, it's time to get this person off the air. (Glenn Reynolds, writing at the Post, has a good one saying similar, too.) She's got a bizarre speaking style, at times with strange, inappropriate giggles, and she's constantly spewing disinformation, or shifting information, all of which blow apart her tattered credibility. Medical professionals are nothing without credibility, and Walensky is proving herself to be a colossal zero.
Image: Twitter screen shot.
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