Maybe it's time to #DefundTheCDC

Last update: Wednesday 2/16/22

We don't propose to literally shut down all of the CDC's operations. Our intention is to impose a pause on the CDC's issuance of new guidance while Omicron's current surge subsides in most states. Ideally the CDC should be an agile developer of reliable public policy; but too often its guidance has been too early, then flip-flopped, or too late to have substantial impact. 

Ideally the CDC should be reorganized from top to bottom, but such a thorough reorganization cannot be achieved during one hiatus. So we will have to settle for a series of smaller reorg efforts, taken during the inevitable declines from inevitable future surges.

President Biden's de facto refusal to reorganize the CDC suggests a naive belief that we should wait until the current pandemic ends. Unfortunately, there is growing reason to fear that the end will be unduly prolonged by the current CDC and thereby yield tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of avoidable additional cases of severe illness and death, impose more intolerable disruptions of our children's education, further exacerbate the financial hardships the pandemic has already imposed on our poor and working classes, and strain our political divisions to a breaking point. 

P.S. What's in a name?

By now everyone old enough to wear a mask knows that the full name of the CDC is the "Centers for Disease Control and Prevention". Now imagine that the founders of the CDC had had a bit more insight. Imagine that they had called it the CDPM, i.e., the "Centers for Disease Prevention and Management"

The current name refers to "control"; the proposed alternative refers to "management". In order to limit the spread of infectious diseases, people's day-to-day behavior must be modified. Autocratic governments, like the People's Republic of China, can control the behavior of their citizens; they can push them around like lab rats. Not so in democratic republics, like the U.S. of A., whose citizens cannot be controlled; their behavior can, at best, be managed ... with their consent.

The alternative name of the centers most responsible for the coordination of our responses to infectious diseases would have reminded everyone that its management skills were as important as its expertise in the biological sciences. The provision of guidance for our response to infectious diseases cannot be left up to doctors and other bio-science experts who have no expertise in people management.

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Links to related notes on this blog:

• "I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take this anymore!!!",  Last update; 1/30/22
  
  
• "The CDC needs to be reorganized from top to bottom ... Part 1 (Trump's Disdain)", Last updated: 1/22/22
  
  
• "The CDC needs to be reorganized from top to bottom ... Part 2 (Biden's Turnaround Artist)", Last update: 1/11/22
  
  
• "Avoiding the CDC's systemic blunders and flip flops", Last update: 1/7/22
  
  
• "Why is the CDC incapable of producing timely guidance?", Last update: 2/5/22