"There's nothing from the CDC that I can trust.”
Dr Deborah Birx
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has an annual budget of about $8 billion focused on controlling infectious diseases and other activities. In 2007 Senator (and doctor)Tom Coburn wrote “CDC Off Center: An Oversight Report on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention” The report is a review of how an agency tasked with fighting and preventing disease has spent hundreds of millions of tax dollars for failed prevention efforts, international junkets, and lavish facilities, but cannot demonstrate it is controlling disease. The good Senator had watched the CDC’s budget grow for decades while seeing the effectiveness of the organization diminish and 13 years ago tried to warn America. In 2014 Coburn resigned from the Senate in what now must be viewed as a pre-Trump, pre-MAGA bellwether of absolute disgust with the DC establishment and the insurmountable power of the administrative state. Unfortunately Tom Coburn, who passed away in late March of this year, lived just long enough to see his prophetic warnings realized with the absolute failure of the CDC in protecting America from the Chinavirus.
The fact that the CDC operates out of the Arlen Specter Headquarters Building and Tom Harkin Global Communications Center means that Capitol Hill graft and corruption are written into the names of the workplace these doctors and scientists spend their day. With $8B per year the CDC can’t control or prevent a Chinavirus pandemic from shutting down the US economy even though they had many months of warning. What, pray tell, does the CDC spend it’s lavish budget on if not running probability tests and formulating mitigation plans for pandemics of infectious disease? President Trump often remarks that “nobody saw this coming” when describing the devastating impact of “the hidden enemy” but everyone knows that the CDC did, or was supposed to, see the Chinavirus spreading and PREVENT the contagion. Fail.
In early March, around the time America went on sustained lockdown to deal with the Chinavirus, the CDC told America that the virus could live on surfaces for days and people stopped shaking hands and started wearing rubber gloves to protect themselves. As of this week the CDC now says the novel virus “does not spread easily” from "touching surfaces or objects" but would not say when, exactly, their scientist changed the guidelines. A similar change of mind happened with the wearing of masks which was discouraged in the months the COVID-19 spread throughout “hot spot” communities but is now a ubiquitous practice.
“The virus is not spreading in the general community,” Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the Center for the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said in a Jan. 30 briefing. “We don’t routinely recommend the use of face masks by the public to prevent respiratory illness. And we certainly are not recommending that at this time for this new virus.”
Almost a month later, on February 25, that same Dr Nancy Messonnier, who happens to be former Assistant Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s sister, warned that the virus was spreading in the US and shutdowns would be required. This message, delivered while President Trump was overseas in India, contradicted what the White House had been saying about the virus and the countries ability to work it’s way through the Chinavirus. The goal of the administration was to manage the limited outbreak of COVID-19 while keeping American businesses open and life progressing as it normally does. Messonnier’s comments gave the CDC’s, and therefore the government’s, authoritative statement that companies would be liable for staying open and allowing the spread of infection. The stock market tanked and the WH Coronavirus Task Force took over as the primary communications source for news on the pandemic.
That left the marketing team housed in the Tom Harkin Global Communications Center with very little to do. The CDC has not held a public briefing since early March. Detailed guidelines from the CDC on how to reopen US businesses, schools, restaurants and public spaces was finally released late Tuesday night but there has been very little interest in the misinformation coming out of Atlanta. They screwed up the one job they were tasked with doing, which they were paid handsomely to accomplish, and that cost America a lost Spring, unnecessary death and economic vitality. It’s a shame there is no accountability for the people in the CDC who allowed this Chinavirus to hurt so many innocent people who pay the salaries of these incompetent doctors. When it really mattered the country learned that the CDC was not worth the money.
Subscribe to our evening newsletter to stay informed during these challenging times!!
