CDC Secrecy

There have been many sources of frustration throughout the coronavirus pandemic. A big one has been the Centers for Disease Control itself. The CDC is considered the "gold standard" of medical research in this country. But throughout much of the pandemic, the CDC failed to produce even the most basic information.

Countries all over the world, especially Israel, were releasing important studies that gave us more information about the virus. But the Centers for Disease Control, that has received tens of billions of dollars, has been sitting on mountains of data.

This isn't necessarily new news. Respected doctors and researchers like Dr. Marty Makary of Johns Hopkins University have been complaining about the CDC's lack of transparency for many months. But few would listen to them.

Now the New York Times is reporting that the CDC "has published only a tiny fraction of the data it has collected." The excuse, according to a CDC spokeswoman, is the bureaucracy's "fear that the information might be misinterpreted." But as some experts correctly noted, there is a greater danger of misinterpretation when there are "data vacuums." 

More importantly, we're not peasants and we're not children. We're taxpayers and citizens. Our hard-earned tax dollars pay for every study conducted by the CDC and its army of public health bureaucrats!

In recent decades, the CDC's budget has expanded exponentially. But it's abundantly clear that the taxpayer's return on investment has not expanded nearly as much as the agency's bloated bureaucracy.