Did the CDC get it right during the COVID-19 pandemic?

By Kate Selker
March 17, 2026

It was the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, and former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky made a call: it was safest for schools to close.

Dr. Monica Gandhi felt this was the wrong choice. She’d known Dr. Walensky for years. Like Walensky, she is an expert in infectious disease. Gandhi was based San Francisco, where she worked to keep her HIV-AIDS clinic running during the pandemic so that her patients could receive life-saving care. She had just lost her husband and she was grateful that her children’s private school had stayed open as they moved through their grief. She felt it was unfair that students in public schools didn’t have that option.

In the Harvard Kennedy School’s John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum last week, Walensky and Gandhi talked through this conflict. They kicked off the School’s “Debate, Debrief, and Dessert” series, which brings together experts who disagree and calls on them to engage with the issues that divide them—future events will take on issues of foreign policy and diversity in American life. (The students debrief the conversation afterwards, over dessert, with HKS Professor Julia Minson, whose research focuses on healthy disagreement).

Brinda Adhikari, who created and co-hosts the podcast “Why Should I Trust You?” moderated the debate.

There was plenty Walensky and Gandhi agreed on: the power of vaccines, the importance of data, and the toxicity of American political culture. And while they also agreed that school closures were an enormous challenge for children, teachers, and families, they disagreed on how that process went.

“We have to get the schools open”

“When I got to the CDC, the schools were closed,” Walensky said, “and the question to me was, ‘What’s going to be our first guidance we release under your tenure, Rochelle?’ And the answer was, ‘We have to get the schools open.’”

Walensky spoke about prioritizing vaccines for educators and designating March of 2021 as “Teacher Vaccine Month.” She knew this could help get schools closer to opening safely.

“It’s also the case that 4,000 people were dying a day” she said. “And so, the guidance very much spoke to: if you can’t see heart attacks in the emergency room, maybe the school shouldn’t be open. And if there are morgues outside of your hospital because the morgue is too full, maybe the schools shouldn’t be open.”

“Children were so much less at risk,” Gandhi countered. “Measles, for example, as we’re seeing now, is an infection that really, really hurts children the most. I think if we had a massive measles epidemic, pandemic, we’re going to have to close schools. But this particular epidemic was very age‑related.” She pointed to other countries, such as Denmark, Finland, and Norway, which opened their schools relatively quickly.

Gandhi also spoke to issues of poverty, access, and political will.

Politics and population size

“Private schools got to be open, and public schools didn’t, because private schools had the means of parents advocating,” she explained. “This topsy‑turvy business in the United States where blue states kept their schools closed longer and red states [got] their schools open sooner was clearly political. It wasn’t just based on guidance.”

Walensky responded. She said that while the CDC puts out guidance, how states and cities implement it is a local decision. She addressed Gandhi’s argument that fewer children were dying of COVID-19 than adults.

“That is true,” she said. “It is also true for heart disease. It is also true for lung disease. Kids don’t die at the same rate as the elderly, period. And so comparing the rates of elderly death for COVID to children’s death—the first study on children’s death was like 40 patients in one site. Is that enough to say it doesn’t affect kids? I don’t know that I’m ready, as a CDC director, to say that that’s enough.”

She said that we now know that in the first three years of the pandemic, between 500 and 700 children died each year.

“That’s about three times the rate of flu death. So I’m not saying we had the right answer. I’m saying it was hard,” Walensky said. “Is threefold enough to open schools? Too much to open schools? And what is one’s threshold? How does one make a decision if you’re doing this at a population level?”

Adhikari asked Gandhi to respond.

“We had these worldwide experiments going on. And Scandinavia, Europe, were doing things really differently than here,” she says. “They got their schools opened earlier. And in this country, we didn’t… I’m not blaming the CDC, and I’m certainly not blaming Rochelle Walensky. I am blaming politicians who took hardline positions on ‘this was a Republican position; this was a Democratic position,’ as opposed to, ‘what is the science telling us?’”

Walensky pushed back, suggesting that it was easier to open schools in a European context, where middle and high school classes move in cohorts (instead of students intermingling at a large scale, switching teachers and classrooms throughout the day). She noted that while the CDC can’t mandate how classrooms are operated, they did suggest a “cohort” model for schools wherever possible.

The conversation moved forward, taking on broad lockdowns and mitigation strategies, the role of vaccines, and the idea of “resources before restrictions,” the idea that people need tangible, financial resources in order to keep themselves and others safe. Throughout their discussion, Walensky and Gandhi were clear: politics make public health harder.

America’s divisions

“I was in India right after the pandemic, and the head of the WHO in India leaned over to me and she said, ‘You guys [the United States] were so political.’ No other place was like that,” Gandhi explained. “We had bad outcomes and that was partially politicians' fault and media's fault and just how divided we are here in this country.”

Walensky suggested structural shifts could make a difference.

“Right now we are in a society where the CDC director, the NIH director, the HHS secretary—they are all politically appointed positions…if we truly want public health and research to not be political, they don’t necessarily need to be politically appointed positions,” she said. “There’s a lot of things that we could do to depoliticize it—if in fact there was enough political will to do that.”

Ultimately, Walensky said, the core of her and Gandhi’s work in medicine is about care, not about politics. As a doctor, she explained, her focus isn’t the patient’s political opinion—it’s how she can help them get well.

“I never walked into a room,” she said, “and asked a patient how they voted."

Photography by Martha Stewart

Read the original article here.