The WHO announced today that the COVID-19 pandemic is no longer an emergency. Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said, “Yesterday, the emergency committee met for the 15th time and recommended to me that I declare an end to the public health emergency of international concern. I have accepted that advice.” Right on cue, Rochelle Walensky announced she was resigning as head of the Centers for Disease Control.

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, submitted her resignation Friday, saying the waning of the COVID-19 pandemic was a good time to make a transition…

Walensky, 54, has been the agency’s director for a little over two years. In her letter to Biden, she expressed “mixed feelings” about the decision and didn’t say exactly why she was stepping down, but said the nation is at a moment of transition as emergency declarations come to an end.

“I have never been prouder of anything I have done in my professional career,” she wrote.

According to the NY Times, Walensky became emotional when making the announcement on a conference call.

In an agency-wide meeting, Dr. Walensky admitted to having mixed emotions about her decision and broke down in tears, according to people on a conference call with her.

The White House issued a brief statement from President Biden thanking Walensky and praising her work.

JUST IN – CDC director Rochelle Walensky is stepping down. pic.twitter.com/ozKBi2FEZ9

— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) May 5, 2023

Of course there will be a lot of disagreement about whether or not Walensky’s tenure was a success or something else. No one really doubts that her advice was at times confusing. She got in a bit of trouble last January when CDC was moving from recommending 10-days of isolation to recommending just 5 days. Initially, the CDC issued the change in December 2021 but did not include any mention of using a home test to judge whether to extend that 5 days. That choice was criticized, including by people inside the CDC, but Walensky defended the choice. Then, a week later she reversed course and announced revised guidance which included the use of a home test on day 5.

CNN reported on how this new guidance contradicted statements Walensky had made only days earlier.

After Walenksy spent a week steadfastly defending the agency’s decision not to include a recommendation for a rapid test after five days, the CDC changed course, telling people with access to rapid tests to continue to isolate if they decided to take a test and received a positive result. But the new guidance did not explicitly recommend people should take a test.

“It became very clear that people were interested in using the rapid tests – though not authorized for this purpose – for this purpose after their end of isolation period. And because there was an interest in using them for this reason, we then provided guidance on how they should be used,” Walensky told CNN during a coronavirus briefing on Wednesday.

This was not her only messaging/guidance flub.

In May, Walensky said fully vaccinated people could stop wearing masks indoors, only to reverse course a few months later when new information showed even those with all the recommended shots could still transmit the virus.

The White House was also forced to explain Walensky’s comments in February that teachers did not need to be fully vaccinated for schools to reopen; a day later, Psaki said Walensky was speaking in her “personal capacity.”

The CDC’s reversal on masking guidance in 2021 is the decision that many people probably remember. After saying vaccinated people could drop masks the CDC backtracked two months later. We also learned recently that CDC was taking guidance on school reopening from Randi Weingarten.

Powerful AFT boss Randi Weingarten spoke twice by phone with CDC Director Rochelle Walensky in the week leading up to the Feb. 12, 2021, announcement that halted full re-opening of in-person classes — including the day before the guidance was released, according to records obtained by the conservative watchdog Americans for Public Trust.

By last August, Walensky herself came around to the conclusion that the CDC had done a generally poor job during the pandemic.

“To be frank, we are responsible for some pretty dramatic, pretty public mistakes, from testing to data to communications,” she said in a video distributed to the agency’s roughly 11,000 employees.

Dr. Walensky said the C.D.C.’s future depended on whether it could absorb the lessons of the last few years, during which much of the public lost trust in the agency’s ability to handle a pandemic that has killed more than 1 million Americans. “This is our watershed moment. We must pivot,” she said.

Her admission of the agency’s failings came after she received the findings of an examination she ordered in April amid scathing criticism of the C.D.C.’s performance. The report itself was not released; an agency official said it was not yet finished but would be made public soon.

So, maybe the best that can be said about her tenure is at least she knows that it wasn’t very good.