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No, they aren't chickens, but you get the idea.It’s not often that The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal are in agreement about happenings in Washington, but on the CDC’s Ebola-related performance, the two papers came out Saturday slamming the agency. 


According to the NY Times’ lead article, President Obama is “seething” at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control’s handling of the Ebola outbreak in the U.S. “Mr. Obama placed much of the blame on the C.D.C., which provided shifting information about which threat category patients were in, and did not adequately train doctors and nurses at hospitals with Ebola cases on the proper protective procedures.” (Obama has taken the extraordinary step of placing his own guy, a lawyer, in charge of overseeing the CDC.)


A NY Times columnist, Joe Nocera, continued the assault inside the paper, noting that the CDC “was too hubristic in its approach to Ebola, and the consequence is that its staff now looks like bumblers.” He partly blamed budget cuts that led to top scientists leaving the agency. 

 

Actually, that stuff was all goody-goody compared to what WSJ columnist Peggy Noonan had to say about the CDC’s director, Thomas Frieden. Referring to his testimony before Congress last week, she said his “answers often sound like filibusters: long, rolling paragraphs of benign assertion, advertising slogans—‘We know how to stop Ebola,’ ‘Our focus is protecting people’—occasionally extraneous data, and testimony to the excellence of our health-care professionals…It feels like how the pediatrician talks to the child, not the parents.” 


Well, I hate to say, ‘I told you so about the CDC’ (okay, I don’t entirely hate to say it), but we’ve known about the CDC’s manipulative ways with data and its inability to utter a simple declarative sentence about pretty much anything for a long time. And I’m not just talking about its politicizing and demonizing of raw milk—its apportionment of scarce funding on ridiculous studies like that in Minnesota to suggest raw milk sickened 20,000-plus during this century’s first decade, or its funding of a study showing more people get sick from raw milk in states where it’s legal than where it is illegal, or the first-ever (and only) government web site devoted entirely to fear-mongering over a particular food (raw milk). 


No, I’m talking about its inability to ever put together usable and realistic data about the state of food-borne illness in the U.S., which it always suggests is in a state of “crisis,” even though the real-life data indicate nothing of the sort. Its inability to tell us how particular foods compare in the illness dangers they pose, or where they occur geographically, or how they change over time. 


Now, unfortunately, the rest of the country is getting to see, in prime time and in a time of apparent crisis, the incompetence and arrogance that we at The Complete Patient have seen for too long now. The CDC’s professionals are supposed to be like members of the military–in training and preparing for the crisis around the corner. The last couple weeks have been show time for the CDC, and it was totally unprepared. It was like its professionals spent the last several decades playing poker and blackjack when they should have been training and staying sharp. 


What’s especially ironic is that the national media and politicians now bashing the CDC have for years literally worshipped in its cathedral of “science,” as if its bureaucrats walked on water. PBS felt compelled in its new documentary series on food to paste in CDC warnings every few minutes.

They are all coming to realize that those professionals over there supposedly worrying about “protecting” us and about our “safety” have really been most worried about protecting their cushy jobs.