Map of life expectancy at birth from Global Education Project.

Thursday, August 18, 2022

Rearranging the deck chairs?

 CDC director Rochelle Walensky has announced a reorganization of the agency, which is intended to respond to some of the problems I discussed here a few days ago. While some of this seems largely rhetorical -- they aren't going to issue confusing and contradictory guidance for example -- establishing an office of intergovernmental affairs to coordinate with other federal agencies and state and local public health agencies seems like a good idea. The mystery is that it didn't exist before. Walensky also wants congress to mandate that state and local jurisdictions share their data with CDC. Again, it's mysterious why that isn't already the law.


While this all seems well and good, our problems go far beyond the CDC:

 

A group representing infection preventionists and epidemiologists pointed out that the nation’s public health failures extend well beyond the CDC, including supply chain weakness, misinformation on vaccines and masking, lack of standards and interoperability for gathering public health data and the need to invest in infection prevention and control.

“While improvements to the operation of the CDC are important, they must be done in concert with other key actions in order to build a strong public health system,” the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology said in a statement on the potential CDC reorganization.

However, we aren't going to fix these problems without a substantial Democratic majority in congress -- nor will we fix any of our other problems. 

 



1 comment:

Don Quixote said...

Man, is that the truth. I mean, I get that there are always crazy people in the country, but I don't think that our country has ever had an entire political group, which used to be a party, and it's nothing but a bunch of liars and crazies who worship a rotten cold figure.

I just talked to a friend who visited Denmark, and he said it was just stunning to see a real first-world country. He said that we are obviously a generation behind the kind of life they have over there; Clean, quiet, people are active, the society is well-run. I would add that with the catastrophic obstructionism and mendacity, and just plain rottenness, of Republicans here, we spent four years going backwards -- and it's not clear which way we're going to go yet, and whether we'll reverse course. It is true that it can only happen with Democrats in charge, because they are the only politicians left to have any sense of reason or sanity.