‘Aspirational position’: Dr. Rochelle Walensky reflects on her career and time as CDC Director

This women’s history month we’re highlighting local women who are leading the way and having an impact in our communities. We begin our series with Dr. Rochelle Walensky. She rose to prominence during the pandemic becoming the director of the CDC. Boston 25 News caught up with her to talk about leadership, what shaped her career, and what she is up to now.

“Certainly it was an aspirational position, but it was not even a job I dared to aspire to,” Dr. Rochelle Walensky admitted about her role as CDC Director.

Dr. Rochelle Walensky said she never dreamed of becoming a regular on the news, offering guidance to the country during a pandemic. As a little girl growing up on the outskirts of Washington DC, she was inspired by her doctor.

“I had a pediatrician growing up who was a woman and a really incredible role model for me because I didn’t know very many physicians at that time who were women,” said Dr. Walensky. “And so I thought, wow, this is really something that I can do.”

Her early career was shaped by the AIDS epidemic. Magic Johnson announced he had HIV during her first year of medical school and she saw during her internship how research for treatment was quickly evolving.

“You can imagine vulnerable patients, people who society have cast off oftentimes,” said Dr. Walensky. “And yet we were caring for them. We were doing all that we could. We were giving them the warm hand, and we could say. And there’s hope now. And so there was this incredible, science, again, intersecting with the personal. And I just knew that that’s what I needed to do for the rest of my career.”

Dr. Walensky spent the next 25 years studying and doing policy work in HIV. She came to Harvard in 1998 to do an infectious disease fellowship.

“I wanted to decrease the barriers to care, for those especially most vulnerable,” said Dr. Walensky.

Dr. Walensky really made a home for herself in Boston, becoming the Chief of Infectious Diseases at Mass General Hospital…until Washington called.

“So I did not immediately call back,” recalled Dr. Walensky. “He said, would you consider, being the director of the CDC? And I said I’ll get back to you.”

At a time when $3,000 people were dying a day due to COVID-19—Dr. Walensky says it was in her blood to answer the call.

“Your code beeper goes off as a physician, you run and answer the code,” said Dr. Walensky. “You don’t even pause to say, am I up to the task.”

When asked if there was ever a moment that she felt incredibly either overwhelmed or stressed, Dr. Walensky simply said, “I was there for two and a half years. Every single. Day.”

With new information constantly evolving Dr. Walensky says she had to make tough decisions even when she didn’t have all the data. And her critics let her hear it.

“What actually happened is that people on both sides of that debate would get on the news and say, well, I think it’s that’s the right thing to do, or I think that’s the wrong thing to do, when in fact I had spent the last three days, you know, in that internal debate with myself or with the team and, and that, I think, undermined what we were trying to do,” said Dr. Walensky. “We had an evolving virus, and we had evolving science. And we had to my responsibility was to move at the speed of both of those. That was reflected as changing our minds. It wasn’t changing our minds. It was staying up to date with the science of the virus.”

She credits her family with helping to quiet the noise and staying engaged as a mom, through it all.

“I knew when there was a calculus test, I knew when someone had finals week,” said Dr. Walensky. “I didn’t let go of those mom things. I was there for them. So I did move them into college. I did, you know, go to college graduations, high school graduations, like those landmark things I was not going to miss.”

In June of 2023, Dr. Walensky resigned when the public health emergency was over, but she says she’s still learning from her experience.

“We’ve made a lot of strides, there’s been a lot of investments,” said Dr. Walensky. “The real challenge is they don’t want to make continued investments. And those continued investments are critically important for us to prepare for the next time.”

Back at Harvard, Dr. Walensky is sharing her knowledge with a new crop of students and hoping to motivate them to find a fulfilling career within public health.

“We know from studies that, about we’re about 80,000 public health workers and deficit in this country to just do standard public health and so, if my presence at some of these schools can motivate the next generation, that is one place that I really like to sort of spread, spread the, the news about what we do in health,” said Dr. Walensky.

Dr. Walensky says the greatest gift she will always carry with her is the 12,000 employees at the CDC tirelessly working to protect the health of the people in the country.

Download the FREE Boston 25 News app for breaking news alerts.

Follow Boston 25 News on Facebook and Twitter. | Watch Boston 25 News NOW