Rochelle Walensky

In a January 18, 2022 interview with The Boston Globe Walensky responded to some of the criticisms of her first year in office.

During a January 26, 2022 news conference about the rise of the Omicron variant and high hospitalization rates, Dr. Walensky said the nation should not ease up on COVID-19 safety protocols, saying, "Milder does not mean mild and we cannot look past the strain on our health systems and substantial number of deaths." She also said, "It's important to remember we're still facing a high overall burden of disease."

In April 2022, Dr. Walensky announced CDC was undergoing an external review following its mishandling of the pandemic. On August 17, 2022, she delivered a sweeping rebuke of her agency’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, saying it had failed to respond quickly enough and needed to be overhauled.

In October 22, 2022, Dr. Walensky tested positive for COVID-19.

In November 29, 2022, Dr. Walensky marked the 50th year of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, and said that she would be meeting with colleagues and leaders in public health the following day, with a commitment to "ethical research & practice". Her comments that the 623 African-American study participants would be honored for their "suffering & sacrifice" was criticized by social media users, including those within Black Twitter, and other commentators as racist, while some users came to the defense of Walensky. Walensky later tweeted, on November 30, that she reflected on the Tuskegee study, that the men who were subjects in the study were "honored", that "their pain & that of their families" was acknowledged, and stated that the legacy of the study's participants "lives on...[and] must never be forgotten."

On August 3, 2021, Walensky instituted a 60-day extension of a federal COVID-related ban, which had just expired, on landlords evicting their tenants. The extended ban applied only to "counties experiencing substantial and high levels of community transmission levels", but under the criteria of the ban this covered an area holding 90% of the U.S. population. On August 26, as was widely expected, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the extension as unconstitutional, ruling that only the U.S. Congress had the authority to issue such a moratorium.

In a paper published in Health Affairs in November 2020, Walensky and her co-authors showed that the effectiveness of a COVID-19 vaccine will be strongly affected by:

President-elect Joe Biden announced Walensky's presumptive appointment as CDC director on December 7, 2020, during the presidential transition. Doctors and public health experts widely praised the choice. As the position of director of the CDC does not require Senate confirmation to take office, Walensky's tenure at the CDC began on January 20, 2021.

Walensky was chair of the Office of AIDS Research Advisory Council at the National Institutes of Health from 2014 to 2015 and has served as a member of the US Department of Health and Human Services Panel on Antiretroviral Guidelines for Adults and Adolescents since 2011. She serves on the board of directors of Mass General Brigham. She has been co-director of the Medical Practice Evaluation Center at Massachusetts General Hospital since 2011.

Walensky had been on the faculty of Harvard Medical School since 2001, first as an instructor, then as a professor. Walensky was a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School from 2012 to 2020, and served as chief of the division of infectious diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital from 2017 to 2020. She conducted research on vaccine delivery and strategies to reach underserved communities. Walensky has worked to improve HIV screening and care in South Africa, led health policy initiatives, and researched clinical trial design and evaluation in a variety of settings.

In 1991, Walensky received a B.A. in biochemistry and molecular biology from Washington University in St. Louis. In 1995, she received an M.D. from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. From 1995 to 1998, she trained in internal medicine at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Walensky then became a fellow in the Massachusetts General Hospital/Brigham and Women's Hospital Infectious Diseases Fellowship Program. In 2001, she earned an MPH in clinical effectiveness from the Harvard School of Public Health.

Walensky was born Rochelle Paula Bersoff in Peabody, Massachusetts, to Edward Bersoff and Carol Bersoff-Bernstein. She was raised in Potomac, Maryland. Walensky graduated high school from Winston Churchill High School in 1987

Rochelle Paula Walensky (née Bersoff; born April 5, 1969) is an American physician-scientist who is the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the administrator of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. Prior to her appointment at the CDC, she was the Chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital and a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. Walensky is an expert on HIV/AIDS.