PolicyCast

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, who served as CDC director from 2021 to 2023, calls the job “probably the hardest thing I will ever do.” But she also calls it “the honor of a lifetime.” When she was appointed by President Biden as the CDC’s 19th director, she was already used to politicized health care issues, having spent her formative years as a physician working on HIV and AIDS. But COVID thrust her into an unprecedented spotlight, forcing her to lead a demoralized agency through the challenges of implementing policy and informing the public while navigating a highly polarized and often toxic public sphere and rapidly changing scientific data. Walensky says she learned some hard and valuable lessons during her tenure. After stepping down from the post this summer, Walensky is now a senior fellow at the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School, studying the topic of women’s leadership in the health care field. She is also exploring health care policy issues in concurrent fellowships at both Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School.

Dr. Rochelle Walensky is a renowned expert exploring the challenges and what it means for leaders, organizations, and the world to protect public health. Dr. Walensky was the chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital and served as the 19th director of the CDC and the ninth administrator of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. Having received an M.D. from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, she also trained in internal medicine and earned an MPH in clinical effectiveness from the Harvard School of Public Health in 2001. In the earliest part of the pandemic, Dr. Walensky served on the front lines, taking care of patients, serving on the Massachusetts General Hospital incident management team, and conducting research on vaccine delivery and strategies to reach underserved communities. Dr. Walensky’s tenure at the CDC began on January 20th, 2021, when she led the nation—and the world—through unprecedented times, facing the largest density of infectious threats likely ever seen in the United States. Dr. Walensky has also worked to improve HIV screening and care in South Africa, led health policy initiatives, and researched clinical trial design and evaluation in a variety of settings. She was chair of the Office of AIDS Research Advisory Council at the National Institutes of Health from 2014 to 2015. She has also been a member of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Panel on Antiretroviral Guidelines for Adults and Adolescents and served as co-director of the Medical Practice Evaluation Center at Massachusetts General Hospital since 2011 before assuming the position of CDC director.

Ralph Ranalli of the HKS Office of Communications and Public Affairs is the host, producer, and editor of HKS PolicyCast. A former journalist, public television producer, and entrepreneur, he holds an AB in Political Science from UCLA and an MS in Journalism from Columbia University.

The co-producer of PolicyCast is Susan Hughes. Design and graphics support is provided by Lydia Rosenberg, Delane Meadows and the OCPA Design Team. Social media promotion and support is provided by Natalie Montaner and the OCPA Digital Team.

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The Institutional Anti-Racism and Accountability Project at the Shorenstein Center.

The Nonviolent Action Lab at the Carr Center.

Recent polls show a majority of Americans say we need major changes to how police enforce the law and provide public safety. Policymakers and political leaders—under pressure from the Defund and Black Lives Matter movements after high police killings of Black people like Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and numerous others—are now considering a variety of measures to curb police brutality. But Harvard Kennedy School faculty members Sandra Susan Smith, the Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice, and Assistant Professor of Public Policy Yanilda González say history has shown that reforming the police is much easier said than done.

In her studies of policing in Latin America, González says authoritarian police forces have been able to block or roll back reforms even in otherwise democratic countries. In countries with high levels of polarization and inequality, including the U.S., she says, police are often given the role of protecting “us”—the dominant group—from “them.”

Smith, the new director of the Kennedy School’s Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management, says studies show that many widely-proposed reforms simply have not been effective in reducing police brutality. Measures like anti-bias training, body cameras, and diversity hiring fail, she says, because they put the pressure on individual officers to change deeply-entrenched systemic behavior.

So if those things won’t work, what will?

This is the first episode of PolicyCast's 2020-2021 season.

Alexander Keyssar is the Matthew W. Stirling Jr. Professor of History and Social Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. An historian by training, he specializes in the exploration of historical problems that have contemporary policy implications.

In this episode, Professor Keyssar discusses his new book: "Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College?" (Harvard University Press, 2020) He is also the author of the widely-read book: "The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States" (Basic Books, 2000), for which he was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

PolicyCast is hosted by Thoko Moyo, the associate dean for communications at Harvard Kennedy School.

The podcast is produced and engineered by Ralph Ranalli and co-produced by Susan Hughes.