CDC Director’s Only Meeting With Parents About Reopening Schools Was With Far-Left Activists
New documents have revealed that Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), only met with parents one time in the lead-up to the release of the agency’s school reopening guidance last year, with those “parents” in attendance at that meeting being predominantly leftist activists, including the founder of a transgender advocacy group.
The meeting, which was held up as a solid example of the CDC consulting parents prior to the release of the guidelines for reopening K-12 schools following the Covid lockdowns, was actually a private roundtable that featured several heads of Democrat-funded organizations, according to documents provided to Fox News by nonpartisan watchdog group Americans for Public Trust (APT).
Following criticism sparked by the CDC meeting with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) before meeting with parents about school reopenings, the teacher’s union president, Randi Weingarten, argued that the CDC met with parents as well, citing Walensky’s meeting.
The documents, obtained by APT via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the CDC, revealed that Walensky’s Feb. 10, 2021 roundtable, which was held just two days before the rollout of the guidance, included just five people.
According to a Fox News report on the documents, the meeting included Roz Keith, the founder and executive director of Stand With Trans, an organization for parents of transgender-identified children.
“We are committed to dismantling the barriers faced by our community based on racism, sexism, queer-antagonism, and other discriminatory factors,” the group’s website states. “These barriers include recent legislation like denying trans people from using the bathroom of their gender, barring trans people from participating in sports of their gender, and banning schools from teaching about LGBTQ acceptance.”
Representatives from the progressive organization MomsRising were also in attendance, with executive director Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, along with affiliate Angelica Gonzalez, joining Walensky’s roundtable.
According to the organization’s website, MomsRising is about “educating the public and mobilizing massive grassroots actions” for liberal causes, including “fighting white supremacy.”
The organization is financed by large Democratic donors, including $1 million from George Soros’ Open Society Policy Center, and another $1 million from Swiss billionaire Hansjorg Wyss’ Berger Action Fund in 2020, reported Fox News.
Yet another participant in Walensky’s roundtable was Elena Hung, the national co-chair of Health Care Voter, which collects donations to fight back against “Republicans trying to abolish the Affordable Care Act and eliminate vital protections that we rely on.”
Hung’s organization is a project of the Sixteen Thirty Fund, a progressive lobby group administered by Arabella Advisors, a Washington, DC-based philanthropy firm that funds left-wing causes. Multiple left-leaning outlets have credited the Sixteen Thirty Fund with helping the Democrats pull ahead of Republicans in untraceable political spending, with the Atlantic calling the group “the indisputable heavyweight of Democratic dark money.”
The last parent at Walensky’s meeting was self-described “activist” Rabbi Rachel Kobrin.
The CDC director’s press secretary, Jason McDonald, told Fox News that Walensky and other CDC scientists “attended dozen of engagements with a diverse range
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