Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

Skip to comments.

The Monumental Failure of the CDC
American Institute for Economic Research ^ | 11 Apr 2020 | Veronique de Rugy

Posted on 04/13/2020 4:37:53 AM PDT by Politically Correct

Back in 2017, Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota told Time magazine that “We are sitting on something big with H7N9 [bird flu],” and “Any one of these cases could trigger something big. By then it’d be way too late.”

Looking back now, it looks like a lot of other people had warned that it was just a matter of time before a pandemic of the COVID-19 scale took place. And if the government had been prepared and if it didn’t get in the way of the ability of the private sector both to prepare and to respond, the impact of this COVID-19 pandemic on American lives and the economy would have been much smaller than anything we are experiencing right now.

The lack of preparedness at every level of government (federal, state, and local) has nothing to do with a lack of funding or inadequate staffing. Instead, it has everything to do with governments’ bloat, mismanagement, cronyism, and poor focus.

That’s particularly true of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). In theory, the prevention of diseases like this one is the agency’s entire reason d’être. It is right there in its name “Disease Control.” Its mission statement page also makes the centrality of this goal clear. It states as its priority “confronting global disease threats through advanced computing and lab analysis of huge amounts of data to quickly find solutions.”

Apparently, not really.

While there is a lot of blame to go around, it is no secret how much the CDC is to blame for the country’s lack of preparedness to take on the coronavirus (followed very closely in ineptitude by the Food and Drug Administration). The agency’s failure to understand the severity of this virus, to provide useful advice to the American people and to political leaders, and to deliver appropriate testing capabilities has been widely documented.

As I wrote last week, emails reveal that weeks after the virus started roaming freely in the U.S., CDC director Dr. Robert Redfield told his employees that “the virus isn’t spreading in the US at this time.” But a month later, the CDC was still telling state and local officials that its “testing capacity is more than adequate to meet current testing demands.”

It wasn’t.

In this piece, the WSJ reported on three distinct failures made by the agency (helped by the FDA).

“CDC officials botched an initial test kit developed in an agency lab, retracting many tests. They resisted calls from state officials and medical providers to broaden testing, and health officials failed to coordinate with outside companies to ensure needed test-kit supplies, such as nasal swabs and chemical reagents, would be available, according to suppliers and health officials…

“This was kind of a perfect storm of three separate failures,” said Tom Frieden, who directed the CDC from 2009 to 2017, citing the botched test, overstrict FDA rules and sidelined private labs.”

By now, every major newspaper has reported on the incredible failure of the CDC during this crisis. Here is the tidbit from the Washington Post:

“The most consequential failure involved a breakdown in efforts to develop a diagnostic test that could be mass produced and distributed across the United States, enabling agencies to map early outbreaks of the disease, and impose quarantine measures to contain them.”

And as if this weren’t enough failure for one agency, the CDC continues to give the public bad advice and get in the way of our ability to protect ourselves with masks and other needed medical supplies.

Messing up is not a new thing for the CDC. However, unlike what its employees and political allies like to claim, the agency’s poor record and its lack of preparedness has nothing to do with a lack of funding. From 2004 to 2018, total CDC spending grew by over 30 percent, from $8.3 billion to $11.1 billion. Unfortunately, the vast majority of this growth in spending—shock!—did not go to pandemic prevention and protection from COVID-19.

For instance, funding for its National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases—which aims to prevent diseases like Ebola—received only $514 million in 2018, a tiny sliver (less than 5%) of total CDC funding. And less than half of that $514 million went to emerging diseases like COVID-19. The rest of that budget is spent on stuff like chronic fatigue.

Meanwhile, funding for the CDC’s chronic-disease programs—which aim to prevent smoking, alcohol consumption, and poor diets—received nearly $1 billion over that same time, almost double the funding for infectious-disease prevention. As Michelle Minton at the Competitive Enterprise Institute notes in a must-read piece, more money goes to efforts like “environmental health ($180 million), injury prevention ($270 million), and occupational safety ($330 million).” All these projects are also funded by other agencies.

And, of course, let’s not forget the large amount of time the CDC (along with its companion in failure, the FDA) spends on alarming everyone about youth vaping. It is not an epidemic, it’s not contagious but it’s certainly got plenty of attention from the CDC, and the FDA. Isn’t it obvious now that these busybody government bureaucrats should have focused their efforts instead on fighting and preventing actual, real-world epidemics—you know, of the contagious type.

Being a policy analyst following the action of various government agencies and trying to hold them accountable feels like being a broken record. An emergency happens, we write about the incompetence of various government agencies in their response, and then nothing changes. And indeed, many of us wrote about the CDC’s failures during the last Ebola outbreak and the many others before that. But here we are again.

This time, however, these government failures have resulted in millions of Americans being all stuck in their homes, schools being closed, the economy in a recession, and 18,000 people having died so far.

Hopefully this time will be different because of the scale of the impact of the failures. But I’m not holding my breath—which is hopefully free of COVID-19.


TOPICS: Government; Miscellaneous; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: cdc; coronavirus; government; pandemic
Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first 1-2021-24 next last
We all know this story.
1 posted on 04/13/2020 4:37:53 AM PDT by Politically Correct
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | View Replies]

To: Politically Correct
And Fauci's NIH gave the WUHAN LAB a 3.7 MILLION DOLLAR GRANT for research on bats!!

Fraud Fauci's got some explaining to do!!

2 posted on 04/13/2020 4:44:51 AM PDT by Ann Archy (Abortion....... The HUMAN Sacrifice to the god of Convenience.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Politically Correct

Fauci has been embedded into government since 1968. The last patient he treated wore bell bottom pants and a tie-dyed shirt, and this guy missed the only pandemic of our lifetime? The quicker DJT fires this little crud the better.


3 posted on 04/13/2020 4:55:33 AM PDT by JonPreston
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Politically Correct

The CDC is a very typical bloated government agency that has let us down horribly right when they were most needed.

They have some gall over there to point fingers of blame at Trump.


4 posted on 04/13/2020 5:05:10 AM PDT by SomeCallMeTim ( The best minds are not in government. If any were, business would hire them!it)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Politically Correct

We give them over $8 billion a year to protect us from emerging diseases.

And the best solution they had to offer us was “mitigation”?

We don’t need to give the over $8 billion a year any more.


5 posted on 04/13/2020 5:07:36 AM PDT by Buckeye McFrog (Patrick Henry would have been an anti-vaxxer)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Politically Correct

Let us not overlook the enormous amount of resources that CDC spends annually on HIV. HIV is not a health problem for the general public. It is totally a behavior problem among the homosexual community. Their own bad risky behavior is what causes HIV. No one gets HIV by getting closer than six feet to anyone else. Nope! You must have unprotected sexual contact or exchange contaminated needles. This is the bad behavior that is the root cause.


6 posted on 04/13/2020 5:08:32 AM PDT by Saltmeat (69)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Politically Correct

I don’t know how much they spent, but there are thousands of hits on the CDC’s web site on topics like Diversity, Transgender, and Climate Change.

See here:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3832892/posts?page=47#47

All that content doesn’t come cheap.

I say this is a clear misuse of agency funding for political purposes.


7 posted on 04/13/2020 5:09:20 AM PDT by FreedomPoster (Islam delenda est)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Saltmeat

Fauci promised an HIV vaccine in the early 1990s. Didn’t happen.


8 posted on 04/13/2020 5:10:43 AM PDT by FreedomPoster (Islam delenda est)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 6 | View Replies]

To: Politically Correct

“That’s particularly true of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). In theory, the prevention of diseases like this one is the agency’s entire reason d’être. It is right there in its name “Disease Control.” Its mission statement page also makes the centrality of this goal clear. It states as its priority “confronting global disease threats through advanced computing and lab analysis of huge amounts of data to quickly find solutions.”

If there ever was an “epic fail”, this is it.

CDC is way off mission, spending money on global warming and gun control, rather than PPE, ventilators, and HCQ.

They’ll blame Trump and lack of funds, and get away with it.


9 posted on 04/13/2020 5:12:55 AM PDT by JPJones (More Tariffs, less income tax.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: FreedomPoster
Fauci promised an HIV vaccine in the early 1990s. Didn’t happen.

Yet he struts to the microphones every day cock-sure that he'll have one for this inside of 18 months. The guy is a fraud.


10 posted on 04/13/2020 5:22:50 AM PDT by Buckeye McFrog (Patrick Henry would have been an anti-vaxxer)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 8 | View Replies]

To: Politically Correct
Agree 100% about CDC. I have interacted professionally at least monthly with CDC since 1974 and the slow, steady decline in functionality and the simultaneous mission creep have been terrible to watch.

Not enough criticism of FDA though, FDA is primarily responsible for both the lack of new PPE production, the restriction of PPE imports AND the testing disaster.

11 posted on 04/13/2020 5:28:26 AM PDT by Jim Noble (There is nothing racist in stating plainly what most people already know)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: FreedomPoster
Fauci promised an HIV vaccine in the early 1990s. Didn’t happen

Reference?

Margaret Heckler (HHS Secretary) promised an HIV vaccine "within six months" at the First International AIDS conference in Atlanta in 1986 (where I heard her do it), I'd like a citation about Fauci because I don't believe it.

12 posted on 04/13/2020 5:31:46 AM PDT by Jim Noble (There is nothing racist in stating plainly what most people already know)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 8 | View Replies]

To: Buckeye McFrog

-—” The guy is a fraud.”-—

The guy is not so much of a fraud, as he is simply a “liberal.” And, I don’t mean that in any good way.


13 posted on 04/13/2020 5:38:46 AM PDT by oldplayer
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 10 | View Replies]

To: JPJones
CDC is way off mission, spending money on global warming and gun control, rather than PPE, ventilators, and HCQ.

This is one of the few instances of a crisis that should not go to waste.

14 posted on 04/13/2020 5:40:07 AM PDT by SamuraiScot (am)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 9 | View Replies]

To: Politically Correct

“You had ONE JOB!”


15 posted on 04/13/2020 5:41:56 AM PDT by dfwgator (Endut! Hoch Hech!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: All

Also they stood idly by while the Obama administration allowed mass immigrations of folks from third world countries with all varieties of diseases.


16 posted on 04/13/2020 5:51:29 AM PDT by bennowens
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 15 | View Replies]

To: Jim Noble
Agree 100% about CDC. I have interacted professionally at least monthly with CDC since 1974 and the slow, steady decline in functionality and the simultaneous mission creep have been terrible to watch. Not enough criticism of FDA though, FDA is primarily responsible for both the lack of new PPE production, the restriction of PPE imports AND the testing disaster.

My interactions professionally with the CDC began in about 1990. We tried to report the presence of Lyme disease in Missouri. Sequenced the genes of the little bugger. Showed it microscopically. Even found the tick that was the reservoir. They refused to recognize it.

After about 10 years our main guy died of unrelated causes and they finally got around to calling it Lyme-like. There was a lot of "not found here, doesn't exist" going on.

Today, thirty years later, clinicians in the area routinely order tests for Lyme disease, find it and treat it.

17 posted on 04/13/2020 6:01:48 AM PDT by Politically Correct
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 11 | View Replies]

To: Politically Correct

The CDC and crew are as corrupt as can be and this is a success to them beyond their wildest dreams.


18 posted on 04/13/2020 6:03:09 AM PDT by 9YearLurker
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Politically Correct
One good thing that will come from this long term: The private sector will be way more prepared next time something like this comes along.

Speaking for my own company, we were caught flat-footed with lack of protective gear for our field personnel (who are still out there working by the way) with the inability to order it in bulk when this thing hit, as the priority on ordering was being given elsewhere. But we have over 5,000 face masks coming in later this week and over 20,000 pairs of nitril gloves by end of this month. Too little, too late. But we will be ready next time.

19 posted on 04/13/2020 6:03:20 AM PDT by SamAdams76
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: SamAdams76
But we have over 5,000 face masks coming in later this week and over 20,000 pairs of nitril gloves by end of this month. Too little, too late.

Yeah, this pandemic in the US is almost over. The number of new cases has started to decrease which is the harbinger of the end. At this point it's unlikely that any of your people will catch it as there's very few people left that still have it or are infectious.

20 posted on 04/13/2020 6:12:50 AM PDT by Politically Correct
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 19 | View Replies]


Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first 1-2021-24 next last

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson