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“The head of the nation’s top public health agency on Wednesday announced a shake-up of the organization, saying it fell short responding to COVID-19 and needs to become more nimble. The planned changes at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — CDC leaders call it a ‘reset’— come amid criticism of the agency’s response to COVID-19, monkeypox and other public health threats. The changes include internal staffing moves and steps to speed up data releases.” AP News
“The nation’s top public health agency relaxed its COVID-19 guidelines [last] Thursday, dropping the recommendation that Americans quarantine themselves if they come into close contact with an infected person. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also said people no longer need to stay at least 6 feet away from others.” AP News
The right is critical of the CDC and urges accountability for its failings.
“Literally everyone agrees that the CDC would benefit from a deep rethink about how it operates, yes? They botched testing during the first weeks of COVID; they gave often inscrutable guidance on how best to protect oneself from infection; they were waaaaay too restrictive about schools after being influenced by the teachers unions; and they left themselves too often in the position of having to reverse their positions as the dynamics of COVID changed…
“All of which would be bad enough if they hadn’t also repeated some of the same mistakes with monkeypox, a much slower-moving virus for which a vaccine is already available. Clearly a major shift in the culture of the institution is in order.”
Allahpundit, Hot Air
“Walensky and the CDC justified restrictions on children, who have never been at serious risk from COVID. Walensky repeatedly changed her position on social distancing in schools, jumping from three feet to six feet to three feet with no rhyme or reason. Worse still, she claimed that data do ‘not suggest teachers need to be vaccinated,’ which would encourage schools to return in person. But the Biden administration didn’t like that, and Walensky quickly reversed course to claim that 95% of the country should keep children out of schools…
“Under Walensky's leadership, the CDC allowed teachers unions to write school guidance. And yes, the CDC still wants COVID-19 isolations for children, even though they are not at serious risk from the virus… She put Biden administration talking points and safetyism ahead of actual science and data. The CDC was deeply flawed before Walensky arrived, but she was too steeped in its shortcomings to be the one to fix it… The first step should be her resignation.”
Zachary Faria, Washington Examiner
“U.S. states with more-restrictive policies fared no better, on average, than states with less-restrictive policies. There’s still no convincing evidence that masks provided any significant benefits. When case rates throughout the pandemic are plotted on a graph, the trajectory in states with mask mandates is virtually identical to the trajectory in states without mandates. (The states without mandates actually had slightly fewer Covid deaths per capita.) International comparisons yield similar results. A Johns Hopkins University meta-analysis of studies around the world concluded that lockdown and mask restrictions have had ‘little to no effect on COVID-19 mortality.’…
“Florida and Sweden were accused of deadly folly for keeping schools and businesses open without masks, but their policies have been vindicated. In Florida the cumulative age-adjusted rate of Covid mortality is below the national average, and the rate of excess mortality is lower than in California, which endured one of the nation’s strictest lockdowns and worst spikes in unemployment. Sweden’s cumulative rate of excess mortality is one of the lowest in the world… Dr. Fauci and his fellow public officials can’t easily be sued, but they need to be put out of business long before the next pandemic.”
John Tierney, Wall Street Journal
The left is critical of the new guidelines and calls for reforms and additional investment in public health.
The left is critical of the new guidelines and calls for reforms and additional investment in public health.
"Right now, the country has been walking down an interminable plateau of coronavirus cases and deaths—the latter stubbornly hovering just under 500, a number that the country has, by virtue of its behaviors or lack thereof, implicitly decided is just fine… Acceptance of the present might presage acceptance of a future that’s worse—not just with SARS-CoV-2 but with any other public-health threat. Months on end of weakening guidelines have entrenched ‘this idea that mitigation can only be dialed in one direction, which is down’… If and when conditions worsen, the rules may not tighten to accommodate, because the public has not been inured to the idea that they should.”
Katherine J. Wu, The Atlantic
“Official efforts to steer messaging away from the pandemic and roll back Covid protections have been justified with claims [that] the public is ‘tired’ and ‘burned out’ and experiencing ‘pandemic fatigue’… By telling the public that they are tired, the administration is lowering expectations, promising less, and excusing its own shortcomings—in keeping with a broader strategy to shift responsibility for pandemic outcomes onto individuals. But given that half-measures in public health will only prolong the pandemic, ‘people are tired’ is also likely to be a self-fulfilling prophecy; it will allow our predicament to grind on without meaningful relief.”
Martha Lincoln, The Nation
"The pandemic response remains under a White House coordinator; shortly before monkeypox became an emergency, it, too, was put under a White House overseer. The goal should be for experts at retooled public health agencies to fight health crises, not politicians in the White House. And it should be clear who is responsible for doing what. The outfit run by the assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the Department of Health and Human Services is being elevated to a stand-alone agency, on par with the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration. The bridge on this ship is getting crowded…
“The great challenge ahead is to prepare for the next pandemic and rebuild public trust. The country needs a national genomic surveillance system to monitor and alert experts to Mother Nature’s next curveball. It needs to fund public health up and down the line as if it is vital to national security, not an afterthought… It needs the CDC to be its very best."
Editorial Board, Washington Post
“[Unlike Covid] Monkeypox is not hypertransmissible, with the predominant means of spread driven by sexual contact. Efficacious vaccines and antivirals already exist to limit transmission, shorten the disease and provide relief to the infected… [Yet] the efforts to counter monkeypox have thus far been a blundering mess… [This] was a soft stress test for our public health system that we should have passed reasonably well after our jarring and humbling bout with Covid. The results, especially with more virulent bugs surely looming, are discomfiting.”
Jalal Baig, NBC News Think
A libertarian's take
“When the CDC was founded on July 1, 1946, as the Communicable Disease Center, its chief mission was to control and eliminate the scourge of malaria from the United States. By 1951, the efforts overseen by the agency succeeded in eradicating the mosquito-borne illness from the 13 southeastern states in which it was endemic. The agency was further tasked in 1948 with investigating typhus, polio, rabies, hookworm, tuberculosis, and viral encephalitis. The CDC played a major role in the global eradication of smallpox and the elimination of endemic polio, measles, and rubella in the United States…
“Over the decades, the agency lost its focus on monitoring and fighting epidemic infectious diseases as it accumulated new branches and offices that aimed to combat ‘epidemics’ of obesity, smoking, and violence. All of these issues have public health implications but not nearly the same urgency that actual epidemics caused by novel infectious diseases do. The manifold failures of the agency during the COVID-19 pandemic show that the CDC needs radical reform—not just Walensky's goals of improved communications and less bureaucratic turnover—that returns the agency to its infectious-disease fighting roots.”
Ronald Bailey, Reason
