New CDC director pledges to speed up vaccination and restore confidence in agency



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Rochelle Walensky, the new director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said she would start her new job with a long to-do list: helping states fix Covid-19 vaccination programs and persuade exhausted Americans to wear masks and take other precautions.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Dr Walensky said the agency would try to help people overcome doubts about Covid-19 vaccines and pledged to increase public confidence in the CDC.

Dr Walensky will take the helm of the CDC on Wednesday as a highly transmissible mutant, or variant, of the new coronavirus threatens to cause a new surge in infections in the coming weeks.

Meanwhile, the vaccination campaign to stop the pandemic is slowly taking off and surveys show that many people in the United States are reluctant to get vaccinated.

“It’s an emergency,” Dr Walensky said, as she took on the paperwork for her new job so that she could get to work immediately after the change of administration. New presidents often wait weeks or months to appoint CDC directors.

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