At the Manhattan Institute where he is also director of legal policy and you have read his work all over national media, youve seen him on television youve heard on radio and, by the way, he holds the jd and mba from yale where he was an owen fellow in law and economics, also a ba in economics from none other than unc chapel hill where he was a morehead scholar. Jim, so glad to have you with us here for our shaft spirit society. Thank you for joining us thank you for having me, donna, always a pleasure to speak to the good folks at the John Locke Foundation. Ive said it before, as someone who has worked many years at a National Think tank, so much policy happens on the state level and John Locke Foundation is really a Gold Standard think tank that has helped to reshape North Carolina and such a positive direction and lot of the strength and resilience right now and sound fiscal ain the midst of a pandemic is really due to the great work of the John Locke Foundation has done. Thank you
so if you have been following pandemic related news and the united states over the past few years, and i am guessing that if you are here or watching it online most of you have been, you will have noticed a focus on the u.s. center for disease control and prevention, or cdc. if you have looked at the headlines at all you will have seen a great deal of criticism from a range of publication types over the agency s response to the covid-19 outbreak. why the cdc botched its coronavirus testing from the m.i.t. technology review in march of 2020? cdc, slow cautious messaging on covid-19 seems out of step with the moment from 2021. cities he criticized for failing to communicate promises to do better on npr, in january of 2022. cnn, in february of that year, the u.s. still is not getting the covid-19 data right. and in august of last year, even as the cdc director, rachel walensky, announced along the findings for the moving forward initiative, the cdc admission of dysfunction mis