CDC’s Ludicrous Makeover
By: Dr. Harvey Risch
August 18, 2022: CDC announced that the institutes have done an external/self-study and proposed a makeover “to restore public trust.” Dr. Walensky said that she “plans to remake the culture to help the agency move faster when it responds to a public health crisis. She also wants to make it easier for other parts of the government to work with the CDC, and wants to simplify and streamline the website to get rid of overlapping and contradictory public health guidance.”
The CDC’s announcement covers everything except the fundamental problem to which the director and the external reviewer are blind: industry subservience and epidemiologic incompetence.
CDC has published numbers of fatally flawed study reports over the last two years in MMWR, its captive journal. No amounts of “moving faster” will fix this problem. It took CDC two years to figure out that the vaccines are not an effective public health tool for reducing infection spread, something that I and numerous colleagues have been saying for more than a year.
CDC has still not recognized that for Covid, masks are useless, that distancing is useless, that general population testing is virtually useless for managing the population pandemic.
That the CDC has reviewed itself and only found trivialities and not the systematic problems that caused it to produce repeatedly failing policies shows that this review exercise was only window dressing. It was not a serious review.
The CDC needs a completely different independent external review to understand how it as a public health agency with MD and PhD epidemiologists could get so much science wrong for so long. The current makeover plans are ludicrous, will fool no one, and will not restore any of the large amount of public trust that has been lost by its poor performance over the last 2.5 years.
About Dr. Harvey Risch
Harvey Risch is Professor of Epidemiology in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at the Yale School of Public Health and Yale School of Medicine. Dr. Risch received his MD degree from the University of California San Diego and PhD from the University of Chicago. After serving as a postdoctoral fellow in epidemiology at the University of Washington, Dr. Risch was a faculty member in epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Toronto before coming to Yale.