Walensky faces CDC burnout as pandemic enters third year

“It was a pep talk,” one CDC staff member on the call said. “The message was, ‘We know this is tough, but we have to keep going.’”

To many of those listening, the call was a stark reminder that despite their best efforts to contain the virus, the pandemic was not over and that the crushing workload would continue. Although reports of fatigue among members of the CDC’s pandemic response team are similar to those expressed by millions of health care workers across the country, the agency is in charge of safeguarding the entire country and the burnout scientists feel impacts their ability to help curb the pandemic.

Just months earlier, Walensky and other top officials had a plan to dissolve large parts of the pandemic response team, which has more than 1,500 staffers, and reassign members to their original posts. The Covid-19 work would have continued, but the pace would have allowed officials to return to a more normal work schedule. Walensky and her team shelved the plan with the emergence of Omicron as cases began to tick up across the U.S.

Now, some officials said, morale is low at the CDC, as a feeling of helplessness pervades the staff. That raises questions about Walensky’s ability to usher the agency — and Americans — through the Omicron wave into a year that could bring new rounds of vaccinations and more infectious variants.

“There’s no end in sight,” a second CDC official told POLITICO. “We’re all tired.”

This story is based on interviews with nine current and former CDC officials, all of whom served on the pandemic response team and worked on critical Covid-19 investigations, and four other federal health officials who coordinate with the agency’s leadership. Six were granted anonymity to speak freely about the working conditions in the agency.

Current and former officials of the CDC said employees on the response team — officials and scientists from several CDC offices — have for months told their superiors that they are exhausted and need time off the team. Some staff members have worked on the team since the pandemic began. While others have rotated on and off the response team in three- and six-month intervals, they work as many as 200 fourteen-hour days a year, including weekends.

Officials describe the response team as generally supportive and say that managers of the team’s task forces try to allow employees time off for holidays and family gatherings.

In a press briefing last week, Walensky acknowledged that officials on the CDC response team are burned out, and said she hopes to rotate members onto the team to lighten the load on those who have served for more than a year.

“This has been a hard several years for the people of this agency. They are tired,” Walensky said. “I have been working hard to ensure that people have adequate time away, that we are rotating people through the response and that we are providing data in real time, but only the data that are needed in real…