music

Welcome to the commentary magazine Daily Podcast. Today is Thursday, August 18, 2022,

and it is actually Thursday, August 18, 2022. We are now once again doing the podcast on the day that we release it as opposed to yesterday's, which you may remember had a slightly unhinged quality to it as we were doing it late at night with some with some fermented beverages at our side, which we do not have today, although I do have a very stiff cup of coffee next to me and with me as always executive editor Abe Greenwald, hi Abe.

Hi John, media commentary columnist Christine Rosen, high Christine, hi John and associate editor and author of the rise of the new Puritans and guest tomorrow night on Bill Mars real time on HBO, no,

I know hi John, so it's very very dramatic out of nowhere story yesterday that Rochelle willensky I keep wanting to call her Claire willensky because there was a long ago, HHS official in the first Bush administration called Claire willensky and so I am haunted by the fact that there is another willensky Rochelle willensky,

who is the head of the centers for disease control and basically announced that there needed to be as a result of a commission that she had established radical revisions in the structure, make up point of view and approach of the CDC in the wake of COVID and I think also implicitly in the immediate and it's not wake because it's still going on.

And so it's currently the catastrophic mishandling of the monkey pox epidemic.

So it is a very interesting thing and most of the people that I've talked to on different sides of the conversation about the public health system and our federal government system.

Everybody seems to think that the plan as she has laid it out is good it's it's solid it's thought through and and that you know as far as it goes it's a good thing that there is actually going to be reform and the reform is going to be led by the person at the top of the agency.

Because you know she's going to have to drag the bureaucracy along behind her I don't want to get into the details that much but I mean the most striking question that I have about this based on reading about it is does it really address the actual problem that people that created the crisis of confidence in our public health system as led by the CDC.

So the proposal as it stands basically says we need to reorient the center centers for disease control away from an academic framework in which you are rewarded as an official of the CDC for the academic work that you do while you were there the papers that you publish.

And the data sets that you assemble painstakingly over a long period of time in favor of intervention in crises and disasters and health problems as they are going on so a bias in favor of action as opposed to fact or data gathering now.

Here's the thing like I wasn't aware that that was the problem with what happened with COVID was that they were slow because everybody there is biased in favor of collecting a lot of data for papers and then publishing them and then getting a promotion at the CDC.

This was there was a unique once in a century crisis in the agency that was the lead tasked with the lead of handling this matter in terms of the federal government response handled it badly is that why it handled it badly well maybe in some fundamental perceptual sense it is because the agency's personal simply weren't attuned were given it weren't given the proper incentives to throw you know drop everything.

And focus their attention on this and change the way that they did things on the other hand why would that be the case like everybody in the country.

So I dropped everything stopped working lost their job put on masks their kids stayed home from school they didn't go anywhere they couldn't fly in planes they you know couldn't see their in law they couldn't go to nursing home all this and then everybody in Atlanta is just like well I guess I'm collecting data for my papers does that strike you guys as being an actual I mean again I didn't do the study I'm a created the study but I don't know that's like okay that's probably a good thing.

To fix but is that what needs to be fixed I read through a lot of what the what the proposals are and I saw very little that addresses what I think needs to be fixed which is I think really two points.

One of which is stop politicizing what you're doing okay but this is you know know as staying your lane point and the other is don't come out with some sense of certainty about.

X or Y when you really don't know what's going on because there because that is the beginning of miscommunication because then you're going to have to walk it back then there are going to be questions that you can't answer and then people will lose trust in you I mean I think that the part of the problem here is which criticisms is this intended to respond to right there there are people who say well they needed to do much more.

That's not us exactly and that seems to be who this is geared at that there's also I just want to add that would have to dwell on it but there's also some diversity stuff in the in the proposed changes right they're going to they're going to need to.

Higher more with the within with the goal of diversifying the staff this so there's a lot in it to me that seems geared towards we need to fix our image that's and that's not really what we're concerned about I think you really should dwell on that.

E ID yeah that's yeah because I did not read about that there are two read the times story in the were two really gobsmacking things that stood out to me in the time story that did speak to what you the impression you got a the first one that made my eyes bulge was this idea of a new executive team that will be created to set priorities and make decisions about how the agency will spend it's 12 billion dollar annual budget towards quote a bias toward public health impact.

...