'What Percent Of CDC Employees Are Vaccinated?': Cassidy Grills Walensky At Senate Hearing

dr olinsky um a couple things as i walked in i came in late one of either you and dr fauci was saying that the reason that we're not saying that natural immunity is protective as is a vaccine even though there's recent publications showing that six to eight months out 92 percent of those with natural immunity have t cells b cells and antibodies that would be considered adequate to protect and indeed b cell continues to climb that we don't have data now in your response to mr casey you just mentioned that cdc has access to tens of thousands of ehrs and i've been told that hhs or cdc has access to patient identifiable data as to who test positive so i do that as a prologue if we don't know that natural immunity confers protection against future infection it's because we've decided not to look because i've learned that there is a cohort of people that we know have been previously infected we've got the bench research showing that the triad of antibodies t cells and b cells are there and that 92 percent of them are still there at age at six months out so why don't we why have we not done the research showing that natural immunity infers protection against recurrent infection yeah thank you so much for allowing me to clarify this point because i understand i understand the question um first of all let me just reiterate that our current stand after reviewing 96 papers and the scientific brief on this issue is that everyone who's been previously infected should be vaccinated but that's not my question i agree so so and part of the challenge here is as you know the infection-induced immunity and the biases associated with retrospectively looking at the data several of those papers that we reviewed for that brief have demonstrated that the kind of disease that you had at the time you had it matters um did you have disease a year and a half ago did you have were you and older can i stop before you we could do this prospectively because you know who is actually apparently i'm told you've got patient identifiable data and you would be able to say okay six months ago we're going to start everybody infected within the last six months and be able to follow their ehr prospectively to see this i mean theoretically cdc has the ability to do this right now yet that too would have its own biases so one of the things that we have demonstrated in the scientific brief is that asymptomatic and mildly symptomatic people who might not present to their providers might present to an urgent care clinic who might not be recorded in their own ehr likely have less robust protection than those who've been supportive that could be established prospectively if using the data that you have and you could even say if you had symptomatic infection you don't need to be vaccinated we would consider you immune you don't have to be subjected to the mandate but if we had data if we had data that demonstrated a correlation of protection dr falchi already mentioned data that they're working on to look at correlates of protection not just in antibodies but as you noted in t cell function as well so if we were able to document a correlate of protection we absolutely could but this paper that i'm reading from cd from nih speaks that there is durable memory of the virus up to eight months after infection and 95 of the people who recovered including b cells which continue to climb t cells in antibody and i'm also saying you could do it clinically because we have data that's patient identifiable that we could go back and look and see if they were exposed they could be in a hot spot like louisiana where you know they're being exposed and then you would see not just by lab data but empirically i can tell you the american people intuitively understand this and they feel a little bit like we're being willfully blind to it i have limited time let me just ask you something else what percent of cdc employees are vaccinated we're actively encouraging vaccination in all of our employees and doing a lot of education and outreach in order to get our agency fully vaccinated and the but the percent i i don't have that for you today i'm told that 75 some north of 75 percent of cdc employees at headquarters are still working remotely is that correct um we are following regulations through hhs and the federal government no that's not my question i apologize to be rude but but but i'm asking a very straightforward question i've been told that north of 75 percent of employees that at cdc headquarters are working remotely is that correct senator i don't actually know the number off the topic okay when you look down the hallway are there empty desks are over 50 of the desk empty senator i don't have the numbers off the top of my head what i will tell you is that we're working closely within hhs and the administration to follow the governmental rules for return there was a recent gao report that shows in the released in the last two weeks that there's been no coordinated response on the federal government to get people back into work now if there's any agency that since we have teachers in fulton county are back at work that the caseload of covid in fulton county is about 88 at its peak it was 606 if what i've been told by someone who frankly kind of knows that people in laboratories are not showing up i have no clue how people how laboratory workers who presumably are vaccinated wearing ppe would consider themselves eligible to stay at home i say this because i just want to echo we've got to lead by example in the federal government if our public health agencies don't have enough confidence in the immunization and the ppe to go back to work fighting infectious diseases there's going to be a lot of undermining of an of a willingness to further fund public health we absolutely have our essential labs back at work conducting their essential research towards this response and um we are following the regulations and providing technical assistance and technical technical support to the federal government for return to work policies uh one more thing i had angus king and i had sent a letter dated february the 25th asking about genomic surveillance we've still not received a response you reference it in your early remarks both senator king and i would appreciate a response we'll get back to you thank you very much thank you are you thank you i'm going to go vote the next four centers i have in my order are senator baldwin marshall rosen and murkowski i will return thank you madam chair so we're here today to discuss the road ahead on the pandemic response and i fear that that road will be a rocky one if we forget the lessons that we've learned thus far particularly when it comes to our ability to make critical supplies

Channel: Forbes Breaking News

Views: 4,231,104

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Keywords: Sen. Bill Cassidy, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, COVID-19

Id: QabAtYBnqro

Length: 6min 50sec (410 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 04 2021