Melissa Harris-Perry: You're back with The Takeaway. Last week Rochelle Walensky, the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced a reorganization of the nation's top public health agency amist criticism of how the CDC has responded to the COVID-19 pandemic. The ongoing pandemic has killed more than a million people in the US. At the same time, the country is facing another public health crisis, moneybox, and the CDC has once again come under fire for its response.

Walensky's admissions to the shortcomings of the CDC over the past two years have come as she received findings from an in-depth review of the agency and she requested this review in April and the findings haven't yet been made public. Here's Walensky speaking with CBS News.

Rochelle Walensky: We learned some hard lessons over the last three years. As part of that, it's my responsibility, the agency's responsibility to learn from those lessons and do better.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Joining me now is Dr. Debra Houry, the acting principal deputy director of the CDC. Thank you for joining us, Dr. Houry.

Dr. Debra Houry: My pleasure, look forward to the conversation.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Absolutely. What can you tell us about what this reset is going to entail?

Dr. Debra Houry: This reset will really help us both internally and externally. We just thought it was really important to take a look within, look at all the great staff and scientists that we have, and really how can we be more nimble, more flexible, and more really forward thinking proactive so we're able to respond to emerging threats better, quicker and just really partnering with the public more on this.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Speaking of partnering with the public. Certainly, the willingness to ask for a report to say that you've made mistakes and to say that you're doing a public reset. To do all of that in public is the thing that I can imagine. There might be folks in the political world who are like, no, never. You never allow yourself to be publicly accountable for having made mistakes and others will say, no, the only way to be trusted is to say that you've made mistakes. Can you talk to me about how the internal conversation around that has gone?

Dr. Debra Houry: Sure. The internal conversation, we've really talked about how we need to be accountable both internally and externally, collaborate more, communicate more, and be more timely. We know that we should always be constantly improving and with COVID, we certainly saw that this put a strain on the public health system, on our staff, on health systems.

It allowed us to say what do we need to do better for the next pandemic because there will be another health threat. We want to make sure that we are more than prepared, that we're up for the challenge and constantly evolving, Our agency is different than it was 20 years ago. It's grown significantly, how we receive data is different. We need to evolve to meet that.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Let's talk about the COVID response. What are some of the big mistakes the CDC understands itself as having made?

Dr. Debra Houry: I wouldn't say it's a mistake but how we got data initially in the pandemic states were voluntarily reporting. It wasn't until we had data authority to be able to get that data. Were we able to report it in a more timely fashion? What we learned is we need to have those systems in place before there's an emergency so that we can be responsive.

We've also found that we need to be working with our partners quicker and more regularly in the field to see what they're seeing in the field so we can incorporate into the guidance. We need to make sure it's implementable. The other thing I would say is with communications. With COVID, we learned so much throughout the pandemic and that was different for the public because sometimes we would learn something that might change our guidance. I think being more transparent and regularly communicating about what we know, what we don't know, and how we're going to close that gap.

Melissa Harris-Perry: The COVID guidance was challenging. Initially, being told not to wear masks then being told to wear masks, trying to understand the context in which ones should wear masks. These were even for folks who were really looking to the CDC for guidance, it began to feel like how can I understand or even trust what's happening here. Why was that so hard?

Dr. Debra Houry: It's because we kept learning more about the virus and how it was transmitted, how you could protect yourself. At different times, it was much more prevalent in the community. It depended on vaccination rates. We needed to make sure that we were sharing what we knew as soon as we knew it. When we saw that people could transmit when they were asymptomatic or that there were some up breakthroughs with people with vaccines, that's when we knew we needed to update our guidance to reflect that.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Do you think that the CDC was overly concerned with potentially criticism coming from lawmakers, from the general public?

Dr. Debra Houry: With public health, I believe we always face criticism and for us, it's really about just how do we make sure we're responsive to those who we take care of and that's the public, how do we make sure that our health departments, our patients providers have accurate unbiased data and science and guidance and and that's what we care about. That's what we want to continue to do and to strengthen and to work with all of our stakeholders on.

Melissa Harris-Perry: You laughed public health will always have critique and criticism is part of it. It's part of taking on the role of being a public health professional. Do you think it's gotten worse more challenging, more difficult, or has the world of so much data information communications made things easier for the CDC?

Dr. Debra Houry: I think it's both. I think we now have a lot more venues to communicate in and to get that data in. On the flip side, with things like social media, you can see people that may not be as versed in data or science also sharing opinions and having some misinformation out there and that can make it difficult for people to determine who to trust, who to listen to. That's where we have to be really clear and very focused and working with partners like you to make sure that our messages are getting out there and that people understand how to protect themselves, what to worry about and what to not worry about.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I so appreciate the effort to take data, take a self-evaluation, make changes. CDC is a big organization and it can be hard to change policies and practices even in your own household. What does it actually mean to implement change?

Dr. Debra Houry: You're right. Change management is never ever easy but we're really asking everybody at the CDC to lean in and I've been doing all hands with many of the different centers to really talk with everybody about what does this mean for your unit, your center, and what we're trying to do is break down those silos so that it's not which part of CDC that you work in, it's that we work across CDC and that we're collaborating and that we know that we're responsive to the American public and how can we do that better?

I just think that we should always be doing this regardless of what agency, where you work, you should always be seeing how can we do things better. Just realizing that now with COVID-19, we've seen these areas we can improve in and that I know that our awesome staff who've been working tirelessly 24/7 are going to continue to do that and lean in to really see how we can be quicker, more responsive and just really pushing the envelope in a lot of these areas.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Can you talk with us about monkeypox, what's happening right now, and ways that the CDC may adjust moving forward.

Dr. Debra Houry: Certainly. I think this goes back to with our reorganization and that's like how do we have data faster and with states and how are we updating guidance on things like vaccination, even our publications. We have a publication coming out this month on monkeypox. The data was collected this month on monkeypox, looking at changes and behaviors among men who have sex with men. We just know it's important to get that data out as quickly as we can, even our testing. We had an assay already in place for monkeypox and we were able to scale private laboratories in a matter of weeks.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I want to talk about one asset that I think is challenging around monkeypox. Clearly, in the attempt to learn and understand the failures of public health in the context of the HIV pandemic, there's been an important attempt to avoid stigmatizing communities or populations. I think that's admirable. At the same time, it also feels like there's been a lot of confusion both for men who have sex with men, for women, for others about their level of vulnerability. Again, I'm looking to understand how the CDC seeks to communicate with the greatest clarity.

Dr. Debra Houry: Thank you and you are right. We want to make sure that we are not stigmatizing any populations. We want populations who are at most at risk to understand that they're at risk but also as we saw with COVID, science evolves, populations might become more at risk than more previously. We don't want anybody to not understand their level of risk.

What we have tried to do is really communicate around what we're seeing for transmission. A lot of that is that close skin-to-skin transmission and explaining that if you're doing that even with household services, we've seen that there can be virus on them. We haven't seen it grow culture as much. It's really that in person skin to skin contact and so making sure people know what the signs and symptoms of monkeypox are, and how to get vaccinated if you could be at risk for transmission of it and how to get treated as well.

Melissa Harris-Perry: What do you think the flu season is going to hold for us this year?

Dr. Debra Houry: I had a crystal ball.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I got kids in school. I got to ask this one.

Dr. Debra Houry: I know. Well, my daughter always gets her flu shots so I would highly recommend flu shots. I think given that we're back in school, we're back at work, more people aren't wearing masks as much. There's certainly a risk for a worsened flu season, but we never know. The most important thing you can do is get vaccinated for the flu.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Recent reporting is saying that long COVID is having an enormous effect on those affected by it, and also potentially a big effect on employers in our, overall, economy. What should we know about long COVID?

Dr. Debra Houry: I think that we're still learning about long COVID. We're working closely with NIH and other federal colleagues understand what are the impacts of long COVID. How can we help people with long COVID? What are some of the more classic symptoms? One of the things we have seen is that you are less likely to have long COVID if you are vaccinated and boosted. I highly encourage people if you haven't been vaccinated to do so. If you've been vaccinated, but not boosted to get boosted. Those can help with decreasing the chances of getting long COVID.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Can we talk about those of us who are 49, who really want another booster shot? I try not to be angry with my pharmacist. Okay. Dr. Debra Houry is the acting principal deputy director of the CDC. Thanks so much for joining us.

Dr. Debra Houry: Thank you.

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