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Cspan, your unfiltered view of politics. Announcer washington journal continues. Host we are joined by dr. Joel zinn berg. A Senior Editor and also the former senior economic general counsel for the council of economic advisers from a trump administration. Welcome to the program. Guest thank you for having me. Host we will talk about your ideas on the reform of the cdc, but lets get an idea of your medical background and that competitive enterprise inches to institute and their point of view. Guest ok i practice surgery in new york city for about 30 years. General surgery and oncology. I have a background in law and Public Policy. I taught at Columbia Law School university on medical and policy issues that involve law and medicine. I worked at the council of economic advisers senior economist and i was general counsel they are as well. I was very involved in helping formulate some of our decision papers and the chapters of the economic support of the president. Currently, i am at that Competitive Enterprise Institute which is a libertarian think tank. It deals with trying to remove unnecessary and harmful bureaucratic obstacles in our economy. I also i am the director of American Public health in america. And the Paragon Health institute which is a new health policy. A Research Center that is trying to improve health and lower costs by empowering patients and encouraging innovation. Host i want to show you a clip from june of this year. This was the outgoing director of the centers control prevention at the time. She had her decisionmaking during the covid19 pandemic and testified in the House Oversight subcommittee. Lets take a look. Guest throughout my tenure is cdc director, i use the facts available and emerging data to inform realtime policy decisions. Rarely did we see new scientific findings that were immediately and unanimously clear. In the cdc, we have a strong commitment to acting quickly with transparency when new science gives us better ways to protect the public needs of the most vulnerable. For example, when two studies were released in march of 2021 where we could reduce the size of schools from six feet to three feet we updated the guidance for weeks after our initial effort. Fortunately, today we know so much more about this virus than we did when it first emerged. In 2023, we believe the darkest days of the pandemic are now part of our history. Despite the important accomplishments and improvements to our Public Health capacities, expandability to collect and share high public data. And Public Health infrastructure, cdc still has more work today to. I have continued to make improvements based on what i have seen. In april 20 22, i address the Lessons Learned from covid19. Increasing accountability and how we deliver information to america. As we continue this internal eternal war we need to better position the cdc for success. In closing, the Infectious Disease warnings that i have seen as director should be a warning to us all. We are once again faced with opportunity. Collectively, we should focus our work on moving the agency and Public Health forward. Our response to the next invention infectious threat response to how we come together and supporting a more prepared america. Host dr. I want to get your reaction to that and i would like to remind our viewers if you would like to call in you can ask lessons and make a comment about this subject of reforming the cdc. The numbers are republicans, to a 274 8001, republicans democrats 202 7488001, republicans 202 7488000, independents 202 7488002, and we also have a line set aside for medical professionals 2027488003. Guest we have responded to many dramatic communications from data and so on. The real pressure is wide. What i did with my colleague of paragon drew keyes was to set out and look at the history and organization of the cdc and look at the pandemic performance to try to figure that out. What we found was a major problem was called mission creep. The cdc has grown into a diverse set of centers and programs disconnected from one another. The most of which have very have very little to do with the mission that is supposed to be combating Infectious Diseases and stopping outbreaks from happening. You have programs that have very little to do with that. Some of them have very little to do with medicine at all. You have a situation where just a small fraction of cdc resources are devoted to combating Infectious Diseases. One has no more than 8 . We think the lack of focus on Infectious Diseases let the cdc unprepared to combat the pandemic. Once the pandemic arrived, they are prepared in combating it. Host your report talks about refocusing the cdc on Infectious Diseases. What other specific recommendations do you have for the cdc . Guest what we uncovered and detailed in great length during the report is there were multiple areas where the cdc was looking at other things through its core mission. Many of the things are actually duplicated in author agencies in a government. For example, the cdc has one of the biggest centers can get chronic diseases. Things like cancer, heart disease, stroke and various other neurological diseases. They are all this same things that are duplicated in other agencies. The nih and there are institutes there that are established before the cdc got into those business areas. They are very wellfunded we are suggesting that you do not need this duplication and it is unknown and distracting. We think that Congress Needs to act and look carefully at what the cdc is, how it is organized, its structure, and as i mentioned, this mention i think was aided by the lack of congressional authorization. What i mean is that our constitutional system, congress has the power to spend. They generally exercise that in a twos step process. They authorize measures that set up or extend or modify programs and agencies. That sets out the goals of the agency, the organization of structure, and followed by an appropriation that provides the funding. Very little of the cdc is authorized. What has happened it has grown up haphazardly with things being a pool from all over the government primarily in the executive branch where the cdc was created not by congress but by the executive branch at the Disease Center in 1946. And it has grown by accretion with all sorts of things being thrown into it that do not belong they are. We think the Congress Needs to go through a hard work of a stepbystep process to authorize agency. Put things in there that belong and take things out that do not and may be moved things from other places in seen in the cdc and also in they need to set up good guidance procedures in the cdc similar to what the fda has. Making sure that the guidance cdc issue is scientifically based. Theres been opportunity for public comment, that people know it does not have Binding Legal authority, just advisory. Primarily setting up to ensure the public that this is scientifically based and it can be relied on. That is a great casualty at the pandemic. It is undermining public trust in the cdc and it has undermined public trust and willingness to follow the cdcs recommendations. Host i want to read you, before we take calls, and opinion by the Public Health professor at orge Washington University and have you respoher mment. What are your views on that and the reduction in funding . Guest the cdc, dr. Walensky referred to this, they did its own review of what went wrong called moving forward. Unfortunately, i think they misdiagnosed the problem they had. They said they had problems with communication this was brought on by insufficient funding and thats the common bureaucratic trope. They say we need more money and what we are proposing is instead of blindly increasing the amount of funding, look carefully at what you need. Childhood vaccinations are very important and the cdc should be focused on that but there is a whole host of things they should not be focused on which is distracting them from the important initiatives like childhood vaccinations. During the pandemic, that moving forward report boasts that in april, 2020 one, shortly after dr. Walensky came into her position as the director, she was bringing on programs dealing with systemic racism and ensuring that Health Equity would be infused throughout these the agency. April, 2021, we were struggling to rollout the vaccine. Less than one in five people in the United States revaccinated. Thats when the cdc should be concert fitting on vaccination, not rolling out trendy things like social justice and Health Equity and they shouldnt be concentrating on other things, things we detail in the report like Climate Change in gun violence all of which may be important but they really arguably dont belong in an agency that is supposed to be protecting the country from Communicable Diseases. Host lets talk to the callers. Id is up first, independent in georgia, good morning. Caller good morning. I im curious if your guest took time to think about the impact of the trump decision to close the Pandemic Response office in the cdc that they had the ability to respond effectively. Im also wondering if your guest honestly believes that two of the most pernicious diseases in our american society, racism and greed are not worth studying because in my mind, they definitely impact things like Health Equity. When more women of color are dying in childbirth and people are not supposed to have dish are supposed to have healthy lives and access to health care, it seems like things we really should be considering and im curious about how this analyst sees all of these issues. Host what do you think . Guest thanks for that question. The reality is, there is this canard that somehow a Pandemic Response unit was shut down and its the discussion the centers around the National Security council. I was there. I was at the white house during that time and the folks at the National Security council who formerly were in this Response Unit didnt go anywhere. They were in the unit. One of those people approached us at the council of economic advisers about doing a study dealing with vaccine innovation to combat upcoming pandemics. We were looking at influenza back in the summer and fall of 2019 but we issued a report dealing with vaccine innovation to combat upcoming pandemics and we talked about how there was a need for Public Private partnerships. Thats precisely what happened in operation warp speed. The end result of that is that you had a new vaccine in 10 months time which is an unprecedented short period of time to create a new vaccine for a novel disease. There is nothing wrong in that regard to what was going on in the trump administration. Its just not true that there was some dismantlement of an important Pandemic Response unit. Your caller talks about all sorts of important priorities. And they are important but the point is, do they belong in an agency whose primary mission should be combating Infectious Disease and combating upcoming pandemics . I would argue no, they dont and they distracted the agency from performing the functions properly. We all suffered as a result and what we need to do is refocus the agency on those priorities so that when we have the next pandemic, and there will be one and i can tell you when but there will be a new pandemic. So that we are prepared to combat it. Host i wanted to show a reuters article about that claim about trump firing the entire Pandemic Response team in 2018. That has been determined as partly false. Alan is calling from east chicago, indiana, democrat, good morning. Caller good morning and thank you for having me on. I am a big fan of this show. I appreciate the opportunity to be here. I wanted to ask about the pandemic preparedness Response Team and the plan. I remember trump was asked about that and he said i didnt do that, that was john bolton. Apparently, they did in the head of it left. That was what happens to the plan, i dont know. Because of the tax cuts that trump put in, he had each Department Taking at least a 5 cut in their budget if not more. The health and human the seas the cdc has 16 centers around the world but they got cut back to 10 and one of the centers wuhan, china, before the pandemic . And it had to shut down. It mightve been a mistake in hindsight. I dont know. Finally, with the response, i think it was in response to covid19. He said he was made aware of it and decided not to tell the American Public because we couldnt handle it. Then he called it a democratic hoax. We kind of got off to a slow start with it and he certainly mishandled it all and you talk about distribution, i congratulate them for the warp speed vaccination, yes, wonderful job, fantastic but he had no Transition Team and would not work with joe bidens team because he was mad about the election. He didnt pass on anything to joe bidens people. Host lets get some response. Guest again, going back to the question of cdc funding, the cdc was better funded during these last few years than its ever been in its history. It got a loan in 2020, about 7. 5 billion dollars in additional appropriations which is almost doubling its budget. Its not as if they were strapped for resources. The question is what did they do with them . How did they handle that and the fact of the matter is, if you are distracted from your primary purpose, if you are looking at other things like gun violence and systemic racism when you are in the biggest Public Health crisis of the last 100 years, there is something wrong with that. Im not just saying its completely a lack of focus, there were certainly a level of incompetence and there was also a level of political influence. There is no question at various times, the cdc seemed unwilling to look dispassionately at the Scientific Data on things like School Reopenings and they seemed to be very willing to listen to influence from teachers unions and other Interest Groups about keeping schools closed when it was pretty clear early on that the young people were not particularly susceptible to this disease, being in school did not pose a threat and schools could be reopened. The problem is, as we detailed in another report called freedom wins, the cdc unfortunately abetted the sorts of lockdown measures which we document in that report as having little to no influence on Public Health but they had tremendous negative impact on the economy and on education. Unfortunately, we will have to live with those results of kids who had fallen way behind