The everlasting “walking back” of statements by public officials is a symptom of serious societal decline. One possibility in this situation is that the head of the CDC is not intellectually capable of clearly saying what she means to say. In that case, she should hire an assistant who can write correct prose, and then she should read the statement and make no personal comments.
Another possibility is that her earlier remarks were a trial balloon which got negative response in some quarter that matters to her; therefore, she had to pretend, “I didn’t mean it like it sounded.”
Another possibility is that she *feels* it’s important to just say whatever crosses her mind, because that’s speaking her authentic truth or whatever, and she just doesn’t give a hoot about whether what she says is accurate, useful, or just plain dumb.
All of these situations are bad.
The “societal decline” you describe isn’t a problem of government officials who are disingenuous and/or have their heads up their asses. That may all be true, but the REAL problem is that we have become such a lazy, effeminate, risk-averse society that we expect our government to deal with the kind of sh!t that real men (and women) used to face head-on.
If you really want to know where things stand, just go back and watch the movie “Shane” … and imagine how much differently it would have played out if Joe Starrett was a school teacher and Shane was a social worker.
I highly doubt she got her position based on her intellect.