Category Archives: culture

The CDC and Its Proposed Corrections

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Dr Marty Makary is on the right track in his op-ed regarding CDC Director Rochelle Walensky’s supposed mea culpa and claimed plans for corrective action in the future. His suggestions for corrective action include

  • stop pushing boosters on teenagers
  • ask colleges to remove their booster mandates
  • ask the Philadelphia school district to remove masks on students
  • tell the government-funded Head Start program to stop requiring all children ages 2 and up to wear masks
  • acknowledge that the Pfizer COVID vaccine for babies and toddlers was recommended by the agency even though the clinical trial found no statistically significant efficacy
  • apologize for being complicit in the human rights violation that was the banning of Americans to visit their dying loved ones in the hospital for most of the pandemic

Those are all fine actions, but they’re inadequate by themselves and mostly empty chit-chat: they do nothing to force the CDC to follow actual science and not the science rumor of the day. They do nothing to make the CDC be transparent about the science they claim to be following by publishing the raw data underlying CDC claims and “recommendations” and identifying the sources of those data and the researcher(s) and research institution(s) that collected those data.

In the end, though, such steps are for the CDC’s personnel replacements to take, after the incumbents have been terminated, from Walensky on down. Neither she nor hers can be trusted to do anything substantive in the way of corrective action.

Trust in the FBI

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It’s rapidly eroding in the aftermath of the FBI’s pre-dawn raid on Mar-a-Lago, a raid that those same agents explicitly barred Trump lawyers from observing.

In response to that eroding trust, FBI Director Christopher Wray had this:

Unfounded attacks on the integrity of the FBI erode respect for the rule of law and are a grave disservice to the men and women who sacrifice so much to protect others….

Unfounded attacks on the FBI’s integrity are, assuredly, wrong.

However, what Wray is carefully ignoring is that this is the same FBI whose agents lied to FISA courts—repeatedly—in order to get search and surveillance warrants.

This is the same FBI whose agents have repeatedly fabricated “evidence” in order to get warrants from Article III judges.

This is the same FBI whose agents routinely lie in other venues.

This is the same FBI that deliberately avoided going to an Article III judge for their Mar-a-Lago raid warrant, choosing, instead to go to a magistrate judge.

The current attacks on FBI integrity are sadly, dangerously, entirely founded.

This FBI needs to be completely disbanded, its line agents reallocated to the US Marshals Service and to the Secret Service, its forensics capability converted to a small independent agency responsible to State and local police departments (and relocated to our nation’s heartland—say Wichita, KS), and everyone else in the FBI reallocated to the private sector.

Late Update: Corrected an erroneous reference to the CDC to be a reference to the FBI.

Again, I Ask

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A canonical example of the journalism guild’s view of what constitutes honest reporting is this from CBS anchor Norah O’Donnell and CBS News‘ response to the outcry over her…error. She emitted a tweet regarding the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, claiming

NEW: According to a DOJ official, the FBI is NOT in possession of former President Trump’s passports. Trump had accused the FBI of stealing his three passports during the search of his Mar-a-Lago home.

This was shown later to be obviously wrong; the FBI returned three of Trump’s passports, which of course they could not have done had they not “been in position” of them in the first place.

Notice: O’Donnell claimed to be citing a DOJ official (emphasis mine).

Regarding that,

CBS News protocol is to confirm news with at least two people before reporting it as fact.

Two people.

It used to be the case that journalists were required to cite two on-the-record sources to corroborate an anonymous source’s claim. The journalism guild has long since walked away from that requirement.

And so I ask again.

Why have journalists chosen to walk away from that standard of integrity?

What concrete, measurable standard of integrity do journalists use today in lieu of that one?

Rearranging the Furniture

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CDC Director Rochelle Walensky now claims she’s going to reorganize the CDC after saying that her agency did not reliably meet expectations during the course of the Wuhan Virus Situation.

The changes will include elevating the laboratory division to report to the CDC’s director and restructuring the communications office….

Because the CDC needs to do a better job of selling its claims. And this bit:

shift the CDC’s culture from highly academic to focus more on preparedness and response

And

Dr Walensky also wants additional funding and more authority for the CDC on matters including mandating data collection from states….

There it is. The Progressive-Democratic Party’s go-to solution for all of our ails—more government funding and more government power.

No.

Aside from the interest in being better at the agency’s used car salesman patter, the wasteful increase in taxpayer money coming her way, and the dangerous increase in government power, mechanically, this is just a cosmetic rearrangement of the furniture. The CDC needs reorganization, but it needs to be seriously reorganized.

There’ll be no culture change so long as the personnel of the current culture remain. Any reorg must begin with personnel, not a change of office symbols. That beginning, then, must be the termination, for reasons ranging from cause to what the military refers to as the good of the service, of the agency’s managers, from Walensky and her staff through her deputies and their staffs on down through (not to) middle management.

Every single one of them needs to go. And then Walensky’s replacement as Director, before any additional hiring occurs, needs to justify in concrete and measurable terms, line by line and position by position, why the personnel slot for that proposed new hire needs to exist.

Only with that change in personnel and that streamlining can the CDC become an efficient and effective organization and an organization us American citizens can trust.