Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Friday, December 31, 2021

A Wartime CDC

 Josh Marshall makes a much more comprehensive and logical case for what I've been saying about the lessons we need to learn from the pandemic.  The CDC and especially the FDA are public health bodies intended to manage public health and medicines during normal times. They have done their best in a climate of uncertainty surrounding a novel coronavirus. That has been a mixed result. This mixed result is not unique to the US and it's health organizations, but our perverse definition of "freedom" and the inefficiencies in federalism have made it worse. Going into this long nightmare, the US was ranked #1 in the world in its ability to handle a pandemic.

How's that going?

We can't let this moment pass before we create a new agency for pandemic planning, but one that becomes a central hub for policy when the next pandemic comes. It does not appear we are going to do that.

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