We need to strip CDC and Public Health of Powers
Eventually politicians will strip CDC and other public health agencies of their power, and I won't be able to argue with them.
Why? Public health misused and abused its powers with:
Closing beaches
Pouring sand into outdoor skateboard parks
Discouraging people from outdoor activities
Lying about the evidence for cloth masks in community settings (to this day)
Lying about the evidence for masking outside
Not running any randomized control trials of masking in high income nations
Pushing masks on 2-year-olds in contrast with world health organization recommendations, evidence, and basic common sense
Culling animals
Using the police state to enforce lockdown
Not letting people hold their father's hand when their father dies
Not letting people visit their mother when she's hospitalized
Restricting visitor access from parents & siblings to their sick, hospitalized, and dying children
Closing schools (but just for poor kids who go to public school, rich kids get to go to school)
Making testing companies rich by recommending unproven testing
Inventing a 6-ft distance
Enforcing stupid distances to make it hard to run school buses
Lowering the regulatory bar for vaccines
Lying about the myocarditis after the safety signal is found in Israel
Never making drug companies test lower doses in young men
Doing absolutely nothing to mitigate the risk
Lying about natural immunity/ never accepting it
Repeatedly lying about it so you can force boosters on people who've already had Covid, despite no evidence, and lacking biological rationale
Continuing the emergency state long after it's appropriate
Continuing emergency powers when the emergency has passed
Vaccine passports
Discriminating against people by vaccine status
Preventing Novak Djokovic from competing in US Open
Preventing Kyrie Irving from playing but he can watch the game
Making children wear masks to go to the zoo in California in November 2022 to protect the animals who shouldn't be close to the kids anyway, and they're all outside anyway
Firing healthcare workers who got COVID-19 taking care of sick patients, because they didn't want to get a vaccine for the virus they had already had and cleared
Firing healthcare workers to the point that no one wants to work in healthcare anymore, and it is hard to staff
Discouraging people from getting routine health care
Publishing propaganda in MMWR to justify your broken agenda
Funding the ecotrust dude after all the issues about where the virus is coming from
Spending 10 billion on paxlovid without randomized data in vaccinated people
Spending billions on remdesivir when it doesn't do s***
Spending so much money on useless tests, that faculty members quit universities to go run testing companies selling said useless tests
Using useless test to keep kids out of school
Inventing unproven Quarantine policies to keep kids out of school
Closing Palo Alto schools, but leasing the space, so parents can drop their kids off in zoom school, wear an instructor who's an underpaid worker opens a laptop so they can take a class with their teacher.
If you stand back and consider the million things public health did to combat the pandemic, the ratio of incorrect to correct things might be 100,000 to one.
And doing all this without running a single cluster randomized trial to figure out anything. To just do it on a whim without data.
So as someone who has long believed in the value of the regulatory state, and long been a champion for increased funding of public health, if the politician asks me should we destroy the CDC, I would have to say 'yes, please and let me help you'.
We have to totally destroy it and try to build a new institution that actually uses science to guide policy and realizes that You can never follow the science. Science can just articulate trade-offs, but all trade-offs must be decided by citizens.
Scientists advise, citizens decide.
That was the mantra that public health experts did not adhere to, letting their narcissism and hubris drive policy. And somehow managing to run zero cluster randomized trials of NPIs.
More thoughts here: