What’s been designed here is a project that ensures a fossil fuel agenda, both in the literal and figurative sense.
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Department of Health and Human Services
control, environmental health, and health promotion and health education activities.”° It is not qualified to offer (and usually does not purport to offer) professional medical opinions applicable to specific patients.
From time to time, the CDC offers findings and recommendations that competent medical practitioners often will consider in arriving at a professional medical judgment for a particular patient. In this respect, CDC guidelines are analogous to guidelines from other public health associations or medical societies: They are informative, not prescriptive.
By statute or regulation, CDC guidance must be prohibited from taking on a prescriptive character. For example, never again should CDC officials be allowed to say in their official capacity that school children “should be” masked or vaccinated (through a schedule or otherwise) or prohibited from learning ina school building. Such decisions should be left to parents and medical providers. We have learned that when CDC says what people “should” do, it readily becomes a “must” backed by severe punishments, including criminal penalties. CDC should report on the risks and effectiveness of all infectious disease-mitigation measures dispassionately and leave the “should” and “must” policy calls to politically accountable parties.
Conflicts of Interest. There was a time when the CDC could not take money from the pharmaceutical industry, but in 1992, the agency discovered a loophole in federal law that allowed it to accept pharma contributions through the nonprofit CDC Foundation. The money started flowing immediately: From 2014 through 2018, the CDC Foundation received $79.6 million from pharmaceutical corporations like Pfizer, Biogen, and Merck.’ This practice presents a stark conflict of interest that should be banned.
Data Systems. The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the disastrous public health consequences of the CDC’s failure to follow multiple congressional mandates to modernize its data infrastructure. Current reporting methods are burdensome for frontline medical workers, yet they result only in fragmented data that are not available in real time or usable across systems.
Congress should require HHS to prioritize the electronic collection and dissemination of robust, privacy-protected data that better leverages existing systems while reducing burdens on clinicians. HHS should also enter into a public-private partnership with a data-management expert to develop a system that makes critical information available to health care workers and policymakers in real time.®
The CDC operates several programs related to vaccine safety including the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS); Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD); and Clinical Immunization Safety Assessment (CISA) Project. Those functions and their associated funding should be transferred to the FDA, which is responsible for post-market surveillance and evaluation of all other drugs and biological products.
Respect for Life and Conscience. The CDC should eliminate programs and projects that do not respect human life and conscience rights and that undermine