South Cook News

Orland Park Mayor Keith Pekau has heard enough from CDC Director Rochelle Walensky

“Recently, the CDC director acknowledged that she is being ‘coached’ by a media consultant,’ Pekau said in a post to Facebook. “She should save the government money and simply follow these two recommendations to start restoring the CDC’s credibility: ‘1Tell the truth. 2. Be willing to say I don’t know. Americans can handle the uncertainty and we want to be told the truth.’”

With the omicron variant now surging across much of the country, Walensky recently acknowledged her agency’s poor messaging in keeping Americans advised about how to best to protect themselves.

"One year into her tenure as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Rochelle Walensky acknowledges that she should have communicated certain things better to the American public," Fox News reports Walensky recently told the Wall Street Journal.  "She says the pandemic threw curveballs that she should have anticipated. She thinks she should have made it clearer to the public that new rules and guidelines were subject to change if the nature of the fight against COVID-19 shifted again."

Walensky says she has now committed to "communicating CDC policy more clearly," adding she has the full backing of the Biden Administration in finding ways to improve the agency’s data collection.

The agency has faced pushback of late over its decision to shorten the recommended isolation period for people hit by COVID-19. Since the virus hit roughly two years ago, U.S. health officials have struggled with messaging after first advising against wearing masks before changing course to push nearly universal masking.

As recently as April 2021, government officials again stumbled on masks, first urging vaccinated people to continue wearing masks in indoor settings before completely changing course to assert those same people could feel free going maskless while indoors, unless it was required by a local or state government.

More recently, Vox.com reported President Joe Biden announced that booster shots would soon be available for all, drawing pushback from even some in the scientific community and sowing greater confusion across the public.

Now running for U.S. Congress in the 6th District, Pekau has made the slogan “it’s time for Washington to put people over politics” his trademark.

A decorated combat Air Force veteran and owner of an MBA from Duke University, Pekau was first elected mayor in 2017.

According to his campaign website, Pekau refused to take a pension and has since worked with the newly elected board to eliminate pensions for all Village of Orland Park elected officials.

His website reports during his tenure, crime has been reduced to the lowest levels in nearly three decades and in 2020 Orland Park was named the safest city in Illinois in 2020. His website says Pekau was also instrumental in helping to save the Orland Square Mall, and to keep businesses open and life as normal as it could be during COVID.

Pekau is now vowing to take that same policies and that same thinking to Washington with him.

“Politicians in Washington, DC, like Marie Newman, Sean Casten, and Nancy Pelosi have put special interests ahead of doing what’s best for the people they’re supposed to represent,” he said in a post to his website.