Among an avalanche of public health reversals these past couple months, the administration limited COVID-19 vaccine access to 65-and-over and patients with a short list of preconditions, chopped the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network down from eight to two infections, and dropped CDC testing for unusual infections medical doctors submit from across the country.

It also baselessly announced that Tylenol taken during pregnancy causes autism, moved to fire all members of the Preventative Services Task Force (which requires insurance companies to cover specific treatments), gave AI companies a share of savings they find in cutting patients off Medicare, and continued its war on unions at the heart of the federal response to national emergencies.

In response to the unspooling protections, groups of individual U.S. states have veered off in national schisms long found in U.S. public health. West Coast and New England states are establishing vaccine alliances whose policies supersede the CDC’s now-inadequate COVID-19 recommendations. In the other direction, Florida moved to ban all vaccine mandates for schoolchildren.

In op-eds in The New York Times and walkouts at the CDC, public health’s managerial class is punching back against Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s efforts to strip out federal-led public health research and policy.

It’s been a necessary and laudable response. It’s also telling that these very managers met protests against the Biden administration’s own eugenics-proximate response to COVID-19 with silence or dismissal.

Failure in deed matched failure in word. The Biden administration moved Paxlovid to the open market — at an exorbitant mark-up — and instituted an employer-friendly five-day recommendation for COVID-19 quarantine that the CDC subsequently dropped, entirely despite molecular kinetics showing high viral loads 10 days and on in many infected people.

Full Article

---

From Truthout via this RSS feed