The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky recently announced her resignation effective June 30^th. There are many possible explanations for her unexpected departure, but frankly I think she’s just had enough.

It has been a tumultuous time to be the CDC Director. She took over the job in January, 2021, about one year after the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. She was appointed by new President Joe Biden, replacing the Trump Administration Director Robert Redfield. It didn’t take long for Walensky to feel the heat of the new occupant of the White House.

At the time, the public schools in most states were closed as teachers unions refused to return to the classrooms without additional protections and money. With millions of students trying to get by with online learning that everyone knew was inadequate, the pressure was mounting for a solution. I wrote about what happened next in a February, 2021, blog post called CDC Director Caves to Politics. Here is a portion of that post:

“Dr. Rochelle Walensky didn’t know any better. As the newly appointed Director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) she didn’t realize that politics comes before science. So, she did that rare thing in Washington – she told the truth.

In an article published January 26^th in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), three researchers from the CDC found “little evidence that schools have contributed meaningfully to increased community transmission” of the coronavirus. The CDC researchers looked at more than 90,000 students in 11 North Carolina districts and found that only 32 students and staff members were infected in school, while 773 got infected during the same period out of school. The science was clear; reopening schools was safe for children and teachers.

Then Dr. Walensky made her big mistake. On February 3^rd, she announced these findings to the press. She made it clear that the science supported reopening schools.  In her statement she said, “Vaccination of teachers is not a prerequisite for safe reopening of schools.” This was a direct refutation of the demands being made by teachers unions before they would return to the classrooms. When asked about her statement, White House press secretary Jen Psaki responded Dr. Walensky was speaking “in her personal capacity” and not as the director of the CDC. In other words, Dr. Walensky hadn’t cleared her statement with the White House. Even though she was their newly appointed scientist to lead the nation’s largest organization for disease prevention, she was not considered the final authority on disease and safety.”

Since that day, Dr. Walensky has had to live with the truth that she doesn’t have the last word on what the science says; the non-scientists at the White House have the last word. After two and a half years I believe she has decided she can no longer tolerate this situation. Sadly, she should have refused to give in to the White House or resigned two and a half years ago and she might have spared herself and the nation the misinformation we all endured.

And it is misinformation that she is now concerned about. In an interview with Sarah Toy of The Wall Street Journal, Dr. Walensky gave a warning for the American people: Be on guard against misinformation and the politicization of science. She wants Americans to make health decisions based on “their own risk assessment and their own personal risks, but not through politics,” she said.

This sounds like someone who has finally come to grips with her own participation in the politicization of science. It can safely be said that politics has never before played a larger role in the response to a national medical emergency than it did with Covid-19. This may be due in part to the polarization of our country today, which has not been this bad since the Civil War. Research by the Kaiser Family Foundation has concluded that political partisanship was a stronger national predictor of Covid-19 vaccination than any other demographic factor. People on the right were more suspicious of CDC pandemic guidance on quarantines, distancing, and masking compared with the left, while Democrats were more likely to be vaccinated than Republicans.

Critics have contended that the CDC itself is politicized, that its recommendations and policies were influenced by politics and that it gave conflicting recommendations to the public. Count me among those critics. When the CDC, the nation’s leading authority on infectious diseases, colludes with Randi Weingarten and the American Federation of Teachers union to make recommendations for schools, you know there is political influence on a grand scale. About a quarter of Americans said they lacked trust in the CDC’s health recommendations, according to a 2022 survey of about 4,200 people published in the journal Health Affairs in early 2023.

Walensky said she hopes Americans will also better fact-check the information they receive, given the high levels of politicization and misinformation in health and science. She encouraged people to check things they are hearing with other trusted sources, such as academic institutions or societies and their physicians. This is a tacit admission that we can no longer trust our public health institutions, largely as a result of her tenure as the CDC Director. I can assure her that most Americans have already learned this lesson.

Under Walensky’s leadership, the agency has placed a renewed focus on modernizing its data-collection infrastructure and advocated for additional funding and more authority on mandating data collection from states. In light of these initiatives, Walensky’s announcement that she would be stepping down at the end of June took some by surprise. Walenksy said it was clear to her that the CDC’s projects would need to span numerous directors and administrations. “This felt like the right time to pass that baton to somebody with new energy, who hadn’t felt the heaviness of this position for the prior two and a half years,” she said. Dr. Mandy Cohen, former North Carolina health secretary, will succeed her.

One has to wonder how long it will be before Dr. Cohen has had enough?

Some bad ideas never go away. In the 2020 presidential election, Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT) pushed for sweeping healthcare system changes based on a bill he called Medicare for All. Fortunately, Senator Sanders was not elected president, but his bad idea has not died; he recently reintroduced the bill in a new version called The Medicare for All Act of 2023. This legislation is co-sponsored by 14 Democrats in the Senate and 110 in the House of Representatives. Keep in mind, none of these elected officials will be subject to this change in healthcare since they have their own congressional healthcare that you and I are not eligible to receive.

The Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, known as FEHBP, serves about nine million federal workers, retirees, and their families, including the President, the Vice President, the White House staff, cabinet secretaries, and federal judges. This makes them the only Americans with a major healthcare program based on consumer choice within a system of market competition. While far from being a perfect system, FEHBP has many beneficial features absent from most existing private sector insurance plans.

But these politicians don’t want you to enjoy the same benefits they do; they want you to be subject to a socialized medicine system like the one our northern neighbors in Canada are enduring. What’s that system like?

Here’s a taste of what Canadian healthcare is like:

Grace-Marie Turner, writing for Galen.org, says Canadian Health Minister Adrian Dix announced recently that eligible breast and prostate cancer patients will be sent to one of two clinics in Bellingham, Washington, for radiation treatments starting May 29^th. That’s Bellingham, Washington, U.S.A! In other words, the Canadian healthcare system hasn’t the capacity to treat its own residents!

The unprecedented move to send thousands of British Columbia patients to the U.S. over the next two years is an attempt to address the backlog in B.C., which has one of the longest waits for radiation treatment in Canada. While breast cancer and prostate cancer patients will receive quicker radiation treatment in the U.S., this is undoubtedly an indictment of B.C.’s flagging healthcare system. Yet Senator Sanders and his co-sponsors want to implement a similar system in the U.S., but exempt themselves from this change. Turner asks this question: “Where would American patients go for treatment if Sanders’ Medicare for All regime were implemented here?”

Even the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is skeptical. They say, “Establishing such a system would be a “major undertaking” that would be “complicated, challenging, and potentially disruptive,” and the “changes could significantly affect the overall U.S. economy.” CBO says that “Setting payment rates equal to Medicare [fee-for-service] rates under a single-payer system would reduce the average payment rates most providers receive—often substantially.”

This would likely “reduce the amount of care supplied and could also reduce the quality of care.” The number of hospitals and other health care facilities might also decline as a result of closures, and there might be less investment in new and existing facilities. According to CBO, the low payment rates in a single-payer system “could lead to a shortage of providers, longer wait times, and changes in the quality of care, especially if patient demand increased substantially.” (We already have a nurse and doctor shortage in America.)

Turner says she catalogued many of the reasons why Medicare for All is a terrible idea for America in her 29- page testimony before Sen. Sanders’ Budget Committee hearing last year.  But apparently, Senator Sanders wasn’t listening. She says,  “We can learn a lot about what not to do from Canada’s Fraser Institute which catalogues the long waits for care across the country. Why is this idea even still on the table here, especially after our Covid fiasco? “

Good question, Senator Sanders. Why is it still on the table? 

Going to the movies will never be the same. Call me old-fashioned, but movies today are not like movies when I was a kid.

In 1960, when I was nine years old, my parents took me and some friends to Philadelphia to celebrate my birthday, a journey of about 50 miles, to see the greatest movie ever made . It was called Ben-Hur – A Tale of the Christ.

Never before had such a movie been made on such a grand scale. This movie was so big you couldn’t see it at your local movie theater. It had to be seen on a wide-scale panoramic movie screen. It needed the big screen and the surround-sound of a big theater. It was like nothing ever before produced. It was such a big deal that they sold souvenir booklets in the lobby to tell you all about the making of the movie. I still have my booklet today, some 63 years later!

Ben-Hur had the largest budget ($15.175 million) as well as the largest sets built on any film produced at the time. Costume designer Elizabeth Haffenden oversaw a staff of 100 wardrobe fabricators to make the costumes, and a workshop employing 200 artists and workmen provided the hundreds of friezes and statues needed in the film.

Filming commenced on May 18, 1958 and wrapped up on January 7, 1959, with shooting lasting for 12 to 14 hours a day, six days a week. Pre-production began around October 1957, and post-production took six months. Under cinematographer Robert L. Surtees, MGM executives made the decision to film the picture in a widescreen format, though against the wishes of Director William Wyler. More than 200 camels and 2,500 horses were used in the shooting of the film, with some 10,000 extras.

The sea battle was filmed using miniatures in a huge tank on the back lot at the MGM Studios in Culver City, California. I can still see those slaves chained to their posts as they pulled on the oars. Who could ever forget the chariot race? One of the most spell-binding and dramatic movie sequences ever produced on an immense scale, before the time of computer graphics and simulations that today dominate movie making, it remains a cinematic triumph. The nine-minute chariot race has become one of cinema’s most famous sequences, and the film score, composed and conducted by Miklos Rozsa, is the longest ever composed for a film and was highly influential on cinema for more than 15 years.

Following a $14.7 million marketing effort, Ben-Hur premiered at Loew’s State Theatre in New York City on November 18, 1959. It was the fastest grossing as well as the highest grossing film of 1959, in the process becoming the second-highest grossing film in history at the time after Gone with the Wind. It won a record 11 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director (Wyler), Best Actor in a Leading Role (Charlton Heston), Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Hugh Griffith), and Best Cinematography (Robert Surtees), an accomplishment that was not equaled until Titanic in 1997 and then again by The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King 2003, before any other films equaled this achievement.

Ben-Hur was a fictional story, but based on the Bible and the life of Jesus Christ. It was a dramatic story that anyone could enjoy and for some it was even a spiritual experience. I shall never forget my ninth birthday because of that movie and even today I can still imagine the roar of the crowd and the intensity of that chariot race to the finish. The final triumph of Judah Ben-Hur over his Roman antagonist shall be forever etched in my mind.

Today we have movies we can watch on our cell-phones, our I-pads, or our televisions. We can watch them in the car, on an airplane, or just sitting on a park bench. But these will never replace the impact of the wide screen, the surround-sound, and the dramatic scenes of a movie like Ben-Hur. Call me old-fashioned, but some things were just better in the old days. I’ll still think of that birthday 63 years later when I celebrate my birthday this week.