Trust the CDC to Reform Itself? Are You Kidding Me?!
The proposed solution is to give the agency more control and more power over our lives during a future pandemic. Does that seem like the right thing to do?
The biggest Covid related news this week was news of the CDC director "admitting" to the agency's failings and calling for "ambitious" reforms, but I must say I think the media might be missing the story here.
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky was not at the CDC when Covid first hit, she's a Biden appointee who was very critical of the CDC early response to the pandemic as not being forceful enough. She signed the John Snow memo for god sake...
Walensky's assessment of the CDC's failures during Covid are that the agency acted too slowly and didn't do enough. The proposed solution is to give the agency more control and more power over our lives during a future pandemic. Does that seem like the right thing to do?
Further, do you really think Rochelle "Impending Doom" Wolensky is the right CDC Director to lead this reform?
The same CDC director who kowtowed to the teacher's unions on school guidance?
The same CDC director who oversaw incomprehensible back and forths on masking guidance? Including changing the metrics just in time for the State of the Union?
The same CDC director who lied about the Covid vaccine's inability to stop infection then still promoted vaccine mandates when it was clearly not stopping transmission? All the while denying Natural Immunity?
The same CDC director who needed a court order to remove masks from airplanes?
The same CDC director who wouldn't send her son to summer camp in 2021 for crying out loud?!
You can't be wrong that many times and just blame your agency. Walensky is either completely Negligent, outright Incompetent, or possibly Psychotic...
The CDC response didn't fail because their guidance was "too hard to understand" or because the agency didn't "act timely enough". Their response failed because their guidance was deeply flawed and ran counter to all prior pandemic response plans!
As the landmark paper from 2006, "Disease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza" concluded:
An overriding principle. Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted.
That's not what a Walensky reformed CDC would have in mind. I shudder to imagine what a "fully reformed" CDC would have inflicted on the public in 2020, especially with someone like Walensky running the place...
I think Rand Paul puts it well in a recent interview stating:
"[They] have misdiagnosed the problem and they are going to misdiagnose the solution. It wasn't that they acted too sparingly, the problem was that they acted too quickly and not based on science. It wasn't that they were waiting around for science. They were reacting every week with a new edict that contradicted the previous week's edict."
He goes on to recommend a better approach:
"What I would suggest if they want to reorganize, is humility. I think they need to step back and get back into the advice game, not the mandate game."
This is exactly correct. Take the response to Monkey Pox as an example:
Now that a growing body of research points to male to male intercourse, not simple skin to skin contact, is the main source of Monkeypox transmission, the advice from CDC is “encouraging people … to reduce sex with multiple partners … if they can’t reduce the behavior, to try to use a condom.”
This approach is exactly correct. The CDC is providing information, suggesting better behaviors, but also understanding that overbearing control measures would be counterproductive. Contrast that with Covid where somehow the CDC thought it was a good idea to tell people "You can’t leave home or see another human ever. Get vaxxed or starve to death because you can’t work.”
It was a complete and utter failure from the top down. The CDC doesn't need reform, it needs to be sent to the bottom of the Ocean. As a Wall Street Journal Op Ed put it:
“It’s hard to believe the U.S. would have handled Covid worse if the CDC didn’t exist. The agency needs to shrink and focus on its central mission: Tracking and helping to stop disease.”
Or as I wrote in February, “we don't need new guidance, we need [the CDC] to become irrelevant.”
Anyway 0 and 2...
An aside- based on hearing the song a thousand times in my house, when I heard Walensky say "impending doom", I could only think of this: https://youtu.be/BJgL9pbDLBE