Woke hierarchy: Is the CDC politicizing vaccine deployment?

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is reportedly relying on a radical leftist activist to model its proposed COVID-19 vaccine deployment strategy, leading some to conclude that the government agency is stressing racial prioritization and playing politics with science, instead of advocating for the allocation of the vaccine to those who are most threatened by the virus.

In a conversation that surfaced on social media this weekend, a CDC employee by the name of Jo Walker disclosed itself as the person behind a CDC model that appeared to put “essential workers” such as grocery store workers and teachers on the same level or even above the vulnerable and elderly.

Emily Burns wrote a detailed thread on Twitter about the dangers and deficiencies of Walker’s proposed strategy:

Walker appears to be a political extremist on several fronts. Prior to locking their Twitter account on Monday, the CDC employee used “Defund The Police” in their profile title. Walker’s description says the person lives on “Occupied Mvskoke Land,” which is somewhat perplexing, given that the woke activist seemingly has no issue taking a paycheck from the “occupier” that is the United States government. Walker refers to itself as an “epidemiologist,” which might be a bit confusing to the general public. An epidemiologist does not need to be a doctor or even a healthcare worker. The social justice warrior, for its part, appears to possess a masters in public health degree.

Walker defends the idea in their CDC model that “essential workers” and healthcare workers should receive the COVID-19 vaccine at the same or even before the elderly population, citing transmission risk. However, given the dramatic age stratification of COVID-19 showing that overall risk is statistically almost non-existent for non-elderly and otherwise healthy individuals, some have come to conclude that the CDC is using the transmission excuse to play radical racial politics with its vaccine deployment recommendations. 

The CDC seems to refer to these aforementioned issues several times in its publicly available presentation (which we now know was produced at least in part by Jo Walker, the radical activist) on vaccine allocation, which pushes for a deployment strategy that “promotes justice” and mitigates “health inequities.”

The New York Times, in concert with several high-profile “public health experts,”  has openly advocated for a vaccine deployment strategy that involves racial preference, one that largely ignores the threat posed by COVID-19 to at-risk groups. Harald Schmidt, an academic at the University of Pennsylvania, and a self-proclaimed “expert” in health policy, told The Times that he and other “public health experts” were continually lobbying the CDC on a race-based vaccine strategy.

If you thought that there was some kind of firewall between radical “public health” activists in academia and in government bureaucracy and the CDC, think again. Walker’s entry into the discussion, and its key role in promulgating the “leveling the playing field” agenda, continues to validate concerns about the radical politics of bureaucrats who control policy in U.S. federal “public health” agencies.

Over the course of the pandemic, the CDC has gone from botching the early response to the events in Wuhan, China, to blasting out confusing and mixed messaging over mitigation strategies related to slowing or stopping the spread of the virus. Now, the CDC appears to be deemphasizing the blatant and dramatic age stratification related to COVID-19, because the woke politics of its professional bureaucracy is demanding it.

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