Healthcare For The CDC, The First Step To Recovery Won’t Be The Hardest Rita Numerof Contributor Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. I write about business model strategy and execution across healthcare. Following New! Follow this author to stay notified about their latest stories. Got it! Sep 2, 2022, 04:39pm EDT | New! Click on the conversation bubble to join the conversation Got it! Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, speaks . . . [+] during an interview with The Associated Press, Dec. 8, 2021, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson, File) Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. No matter your political persuasion, critiquing the administration, any administration, has become something of a blood sport, but credit should be given where credit is due. The world watched when Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director, Rochelle Walensky took to the microphones last month to provide a mea culpa about how her agency mismanaged the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s very rare that a government body faces the public and admits error. But in one of the more refreshing takes from a public official we’ve heard in recent memory, Walensky said in a statement, “For 75 years, CDC and public health have been preparing for COVID-19, and in our big moment, our performance did not reliably meet expectations. My goal is a new, public health action-oriented culture at CDC that emphasizes accountability, collaboration, communication, and timeliness. ” The key word here is “culture. ” It is reminiscent of the culture that existed at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) just before the final ill-fated voyage of the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986. Internally, engineers knew and shared the fact that there were sealing issues with the O-rings that separated key components of the booster assembly. After a night of mid-teen temperatures, they would be brittle at temperatures less than 53 degrees. NASA executives behaved then much like the CDC did during the pandemic, and couldn’t see the evidence in front of them for what it was. As it was, they had already delayed a highly publicized launch that was to carry the first teacher into space, Christa McAuliffe. Rather than delay it any further, they crossed their fingers, hoping for the best and instead got the worst aeronautical disaster in history, the first in-flight fatalities of an American spacecraft ever. Within the CDC, there were likely concerns as well, especially when Covid came calling. Among the larger medical community, there was significant pushback against the policies that unspooled in the states from CDC recommendations. Much of this was expressed in what became the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD). The GBD specifically called for a “Focused Protection” approach that took into account the damaging mental and physical health effects of Covid-19 management policy. One of the GBD authors, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, called the pandemic response “the single biggest public health disaster of all time. ” Despite the legitimate concerns he and others expressed, social media giants like Twitter suspended accounts from epidemiologists and disease management experts to support a uniform government message that in the end got an awful lot wrong. Anything contrary to the narrative was tagged as “misinformation” and pointed readers back to the same flawed CDC guidelines. In hindsight, much of what was flagged as erroneous was proven to be right all along. The burdensome and onerous isolation requirements for children who test negative is just one example of many. MORE FOR YOU CDC: Salmonella Outbreak Has Left 279 Ill, 26 Hospitalized In 29 States Canadians End Up In ICU After Attending ‘Covid Party’ White House Mandates Pfizer Vaccines for Millions of Citizens . . . Before the FDA Clinical or Safety Reviews Have Been Made Public An important lesson emerged from this episode: when real knowledge is hard to come by it doesn't make sense to silence, alienate, and attack the informed contributions of concerned experts in the relevant fields. The public certainly agrees that the pandemic was managed badly. The latest results from Pew Research suggest that the government’s reputation in pandemic management has been less than enviable. Respondents reported that there was inadequate consideration for K-12 students – where around 124,000 U. S. public and private schools were closed affecting over 55 million students. The New York Times just reported that reading and math scores tumbled to 1990 levels as a result of school closures. Pew respondents also indicated that governments failed to balance overall public and mental health and quality of life. Recall that, at a minimum, more than 70,000 restaurants closed, leaving many thousands more unemployed. Not to mention the exploding mental health crisis that the pandemic engendered. It’s too early to say precisely how effective the CDC reforms will be, but we still routinely see reversals in recommendations from once untarnished public health institutions creating a sense of “déjà vu" all over again, indicating a structural problem. The World Health Organization announced that breakthrough cases of monkeypox have occurred among the vaccinated. Mutations in the virus have impaired the effectiveness of the vaccines specifically designed to protect against monkeypox, they now tell us. For Covid-19, the status of once critical guidance is in reverse. Even with roughly 400 deaths a day from omicron, the CDC has finally allowed that the six-foot social distancing recommendation is no longer needed. The latest guidance also substitutes masking for quarantining if one gets exposed. The quarantine requirements for foreign visitors has also been dropped along with routine testing in K-12 schools. On the horizon are other threats. Polio has appeared in the U. S. in one unvaccinated person. Should it return, and spread via a new mutation , can we look to the CDC for guidance? After all that has occurred, will we look to the CDC for guidance? Absent credible institutions this is very concerning. I’ve made the case here in this column that credibility needs to be restored for us to put trust in our institutions again. The CDC certainly has its work cut out for it. Changing a culture is notoriously difficult, especially in bureaucratically run government agencies that don’t have accountability ingrained. Reforming an institution like this will involve building the capacity to be nimble and disciplined. More importantly, it will require installing mechanisms at every level of the organization that allow and more importantly expect people to ask, “are you sure this is a good idea?” Professional retaliation for voicing opinions should be off the table in preference to hearing and considering contributions — even when they challenge the status quo. The agency must allow for the wrestling of differing ideas and opinions and build a culture that encourages debate, disagreement, and challenges to the assumptions on the table. These must be done constructively accompanied by and grounded in, a passionate belief in the mission, the vision, and the focus of the organization. Walensky’s statement and the desire to radically improve guidance for the future have to be seen as a positive first step. The efforts, however, must be long-term. We've got to make investments in public health and behavioral health, and they need to be undertaken in a mission-focused way that reflects science as a method for establishing truth-seeking instead of a dogmatic application of political ideology. Follow me on Twitter . Check out my website . Rita Numerof Editorial Standards Print Reprints & Permissions.