Thread by @JewhadiTM

The CDC was Fighting Racism and Obesity Instead of Stopping Epidemics (via @Sultanknish) frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/cd…

The Centers for Disease Control has a $6.6 billion budget and one job which it messes up every time.

The last time the @CDC had a serious workout was six years ago during the Ebola crisis.

Back then CDC guidelines allowed medical personnel infected with Ebola to avoid a quarantine and interact with Americans until they showed undeniable symptoms of the disease.

There were no protocols in place for treating the potentially infected resulting in the further spread of the disease inside the United States.

At the height of the crisis, confidence in the CDC fell to 37%.

Meanwhile, CDC personnel had managed to mishandle Ebola virus samples, accidentally sending samples of the live virus to CDC labs. And the heads of the health bureaucracy blamed the lack of funding for their failure to have an Ebola vaccine.

The self-quarantine measures adopted in response to the coronavirus outbreak are partially a response to the lessons of the Ebola disaster.

But during the Ebola crisis, Democrats tried to shift responsibility from the Obama administration by blaming Republicans for cutting the CDC’s budget from $6.5 billion to $5.9 billion. Sound familiar? Where do those billions for the CDC actually go?

Among other things, pushing gun control. The terrible budget deal from December allocated $25 million to the CDC and NIH to study gun violence.

During the Ebola crisis, the CDC had been spending a mere $2.6 million on gun violence studies.

But the CDC has a history of wasting money on everything from a $106 million visitor's center with Japanese gardens, a $200K gym, a transgender beauty pageant, not to mention promoting bike paths.

The occasional outbreak only calls the CDC’s general incompetence to everyone’s attention. The rest of the time its incompetence, like that of other government agencies, just ticks along wasting money.

Unlike fighting malaria by spraying DDT, fighting syphilis by combatting racism doesn’t work.

The CDC’s fight against the “obesity epidemic” is even sillier.

That includes funding 15 colleges to “work with community extension services to increase access to healthier foods and safe and accessible places for physical activity.” That meant giving LSU over a million bucks to work with farmers’ markets.

Obesity obviously can kill people, but it’s not something that the CDC can or should be trying to fix.

Every administration has tried to put its own stamp on the CDC by playing around with organizational charts and adding more pointless initiatives.

Meanwhile all those billions of dollars that Americans think are going to fight the outbreaks of contagious diseases are going to anything and everything but.

There is a vast gap between what the CDC should be doing and what it does.

What it ought to be doing is utilizing its unique specialties and capabilities to study dangerous contagious diseases.

And then we discover that they don’t work.

No one thinks about the CDC until we need it and discover it doesn’t work. And then the same story repeats itself a few years later while the CDC goes back to battling obesity and racism.

We don’t need a CDC that changes people’s minds about eating chocolate or engaging in unprotected sex. There are already multiple redundant parts of the government that are trying and failing there.

We need a CDC that deals with viruses instead of trying to brainwash people.