Editors of National Review Online critique recent actions from a high-profile Trump administration health official.
There’s every reason to question the authority, wisdom, and elementary competence of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Indeed, any American who lived through its response to the Covid pandemic should be skeptical of the public-health agency.
The CDC’s initial poor performance might be charitably chalked up to the novelty of the coronavirus it was combating, but not its power grabs — like its assumption of the authority to impose a moratorium on tenant evictions — and nakedly political maneuverings.
President Biden’s choice to lead the agency, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, was forced to backtrack from her February 2021 position that “schools can safely re-open” without universal teacher vaccination. Walensky’s humiliation made it clear that the interests of teachers’ unions, not the needs of children, would be Biden’s priority. …
… All this and more is why the right is understandably suspicious of the public-health apparatus, and might welcome Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy’s brute-force shakeup of the CDC. He is ousting CDC Director Susan Monarez from the role to which the Senate confirmed her in July (Monarez is contesting her firing). In protest against her treatment, three of Monarez’s CDC colleagues resigned.
The problem is that all of this is clearly in service of Kennedy’s anti-vax agenda rather than in pursuit of the goal of depoliticizing the CDC and getting it to examine, fully and rigorously, its Covid errors to better prepare itself for the next pandemic.
Kennedy has dismissed all 17 members of the CDC’s advisory committee on vaccines, filling some of those roles with fellow vaccine skeptics. A committed promoter of unfounded theories about autism’s causes, among other kooky beliefs, Kennedy is preparing to release a report on the “root causes” of autism that he says will claim that certain medical “interventions” are “almost certainly causing autism.”
