 is the restructuring of the CDC. So story today out that the head of the CDC is announcing a massive restructuring of the agency that they recognize that they completely failed. They failed with COVID and they're failing now with monkeypox and that a complete restructuring is necessary and required. And they are putting certain things into place. There is a strategy. There's a, I mean, great. It's certainly good to hear somebody admit their mistakes. Doesn't happen a lot on the chat on my, on the chat of my show. And it doesn't happen a lot in our society. And it certainly doesn't happen a lot in government. The CDC messed up COVID almost as bad as one could imagine messing it up. It's hard to imagine doing a worse job than they did. I don't think it has to do with the specific personalities. I think it has to do with the fact that they don't know what their mission is and they don't know what their job is. And it's not clear that the way their job and mission are defined is, makes the job possible. I think it sets it up, sets it up for failure. We'll talk about that. I mean, I don't want to have to go through the whole series of errors and mistakes and failures of the CDC. And we probably don't even agree on what all of them are. But it's long. And it started from day, from the day COVID really was discovered to be an issue. From the day that the information was that there is a contagious coronavirus spreading in China and likely to become a global phenomena. The CDC screwed it up from that day on. They got very little right. Now, part of that without a doubt is the fault of the Trump administration, the particular people in primarily Trump is stupidity, ignorance and evasion in the first couple of months of this issue, primarily in January, February of 2020 where the keyword was evade, evade, evade, evade, pretend it doesn't exist and pretend it went away. But it's not just that. It can't just be blamed on Trump even though Trump certainly played an important role of it. I mean, my view is just on the basis of how Trump responded to COVID and how Trump managed to use the boss, right? How managed the COVID response. Just on that basis, he shouldn't be present again. I mean, that is such a failure and such a scale that disqualifies you from the job that you were at. No matter what that job is. Again, I'm gonna put it on the side even if you take out Trump, it wasn't Trump who forced the CDC to say, oh, no, no, you have to use out test. We don't allow private testing labs to design their own tests. It wasn't the CDC that finally when they did produce their own test, it didn't work. That had nothing to do with the Trump that had to do with the CDC. The CDC screwed up the test and then the CDC screwed up testing. It screwed up the purchase, the scaling up of testing. It completely messed up and provided the wrong guidance to states and localities about contact tracing and about everything that you're supposed to do that the CDC knew was supposed to do in terms of dealing with pandemic. Sadly, I think that the restructuring that was announced today about the CDC is nowhere near enough because partially it does not really indicate what the purpose of the CDC is and what the scope of the CDC is. I think one of the biggest problems with the CDC is that its mission is way, way, way too broad because it starts and ends with the concept of public health and it's not clear what public health really means. It's not clear that there is such a thing as public health. There is such a thing as a government's job and responsibility vis-a-vis contagious diseases. That I think is you need a government function around that. You need somebody like the CDC to manage a response to a contagious disease, a deadly contagious disease, not a regular contagious disease but a deadly contagious disease. And none of this, by the way, has anything to do with the experts or not experts or anything like that. I mean, you can be the world's biggest expert on anything. You can make mistakes. I mean, I don't get this, oh yes, experts, that's the problem. No, I mean, we want experts. We love experts. If anything, we want better experts. Experts will make fewer mistakes. Experts will make better predictions. You know, life would halt to a stop if we didn't have experts. So this is not, I mean, slamming the CDC is not slamming experts. I think it's a problem of a mission that cannot be attained. It's trying to manage healthcare. It's trying to manage hospitalization. It's trying to figure out what optimal levels of, I don't know, infection, testing, hospitalizations are. Instead of narrowing the scope of what you're supposed to do. And in the case of the CDC, the scope is to identify a contagious disease and provide individuals, the public, with the tools and the capabilities to test and to isolate. And in cases of a very deadly disease, the government should get involved in testing and isolating people who have the disease. But that's it. It's not about manufacturing tests which the CDC got in the business of doing. It's not about an endless stream of diseases out there. It's about contagious, deadly contagious diseases. That's the only thing the CDC should be worried about. Not about public health. Not about other aspects of health. Not about, not even about really in a free market at least. Not even about hospital capacity. Hospital capacity should be a worry and a concern of hospitals. Now, we don't live in a free market. So it's hard to say the government should intervene when the government is regulating hospital capacity, when the government doesn't allow the market to adjust to hospital capacity, when the government basically controls hospital capacity. So yes, the CDC has to manage that today, but it should get out of that business. States, state regulators, federal regulators should get out of the business of telling hospitals how many beds they can have. What kind of emergency facilities they can construct? They should get out of the business of particularly private hospitals, of telling private hospitals what they can and cannot do. So the CDC should not be in the business of telling people to mask up or not to mask up. It should not be in the business of forcing airlines to mask or not to mask. It shouldn't be in the business of telling people to vaccinate or not to vaccinate. In a free market, I mean, the CDC can provide data because it has access to a lot of data. It can provide information. It can even provide general recommendations based on their physicians. But those recommendations shouldn't be to us, the public. What do we know? They should be recommendations to doctors, to hospitals, to clinics. And then we as the public should be guided by our doctor. And yeah, it's really important who you choose as your doctor. So what needs to be restructured is the whole conception of the CDC. One of the complaints about the CDC that people have made is it didn't have enough budget. No, my argument is it had way too much budget, has way too much money, way too much power, way too much influence, and its scope of operations is way too large. Focus, infectious diseases, deadly infectious diseases, testing, isolating, data, broad recommendations to doctors, clinics, and hospitals. That's it. Instead, let me read to you some of the recommendations. You need to share scientific findings and data faster. Yes, but again, with whom and for what? And only reason this is required today is because all this research is being funded by the government and, but it shouldn't be. Okay, so release scientific findings and data more quickly in response to the need for information and actions and be transparent about agencies' current level of understanding. Yeah, be honest, be transparent. That goes back to the state secrets. What the CDC knows should not be a secret. The CDC should be 100% transparent about what it knows, what it doesn't know, what it's erred, what it's made mistakes about. So that's good. Prioritize public health communication. And a lot of this is about communication. Oh, sorry, translate science into practical, easy to understand policy. No, CDC should not be involved in policy. The CDC should explain what's going on, what's happening, should provide the data. Again, should make sure that testing is happening and people are being isolated, they need to be isolated, and that's it. And to the extent that there's a lot of data and they're accumulating a lot of data, release that data. The translate science into practical, easy to understand policy should be done by local authorities, should be done by private individuals, should be done by doctors, should be done by scientific, I don't know, organizations. And there can be competition around that, around figuring out what the right behavior should be. The government should have no policy around these things. They wanna implement a standardized policy development process for implementing guidance documents that would be vetted appropriately. I don't even know what that means. But a lot of this has to do with we need to be better communicators. This is the next one. Prioritize public health communication. Prioritize and enhance public facing health communication practices and staff expertise. Yeah, they could have done a much better job communicating. No question, but that's not the failure. And again, it's not clear to me that it's the CDC that should be communicating these things. They should provide information and data and we individuals should be responsible for ourselves. We'll get to individual responsibility in a minute. Promote results-based partnerships. Whoops, the article just disappeared on me. Where did it go? There it is. Work more effectively with our public health partners to accomplish result-oriented goals and work to address the limitations of a siloed approach to solving major public health problems. Develop a workplace prepared for future emergencies. Again, I mean, this all sounds like McKinsey came in, some consultant came in and gave the five bullet points on how to make the CDC more effective. But what is the job of the CDC? What's the strategy? What's the purpose? And how do we limit the CDC to its purpose instead of driving policy, instead of driving any decision that an individual makes instead of driving all that? Shouldn't it just be sticking to what it's supposed to be doing and what it's responsible for doing? So limit, shrink, get coming out of the way. And one of the complaints, I read this in one of these articles about this restructuring. So the CDC's been criticized of its different policies, lift quantities, both quantities, all this stuff, and it changes its mind all the time and it goes back and forth. But one of the biggest criticisms they have, and this is the problem that the CDC faces, right? And this is, I think the problem we all face. One of the criticisms from doctors and public health experts is that the agency is embracing personal responsibility of a public health when it is responsible for the later ladder. And this is the problem with public health is there is no such thing as public health. All there is is individual responsibility. And what the agency should be embracing fully and it's never embraced, not really, is personal responsibility, individual responsibility and providing individuals with the data, with the knowledge, with the information, with the menu of options and letting individuals and their doctors make decisions for themselves. That was always should have been what was done, providing data, information, testing capabilities. I think the state has a role in isolating with a deadly disease, but in this case, they completely screwed up the testing and isolating. But beyond that, all it is is data, information, options, no policy, let individuals and doctors and health professionals make decisions for themselves. And I don't want to get into arguments about what the particular policies, what the particular options, what all this stuff, because did they produce misinformation and so on? I mean, were they right or were they wrong? They were wrong often, but so is everybody. Your doctors not gonna be wrong sometimes, they're gonna be wrong too. So the fact that experts made mistakes means nothing to me. I still want experts and lots of them. I just don't want experts running the world. I want to be able to choose my experts. I want to get guidance from the experts I choose and I want those experts to be incredibly knowledgeable with a lot of information. All right, thank you for listening or watching the Iran book show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening, you get value from watching, show your appreciation. You can do that by going to iranbookshow.com slash support by going to Patreon, subscribe star locals and just making a appropriate contribution on any one of those, any one of those channels. Also, if you'd like to see the Iran book show grow, please consider sharing our content and of course, subscribe. 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