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Two Must-Reads: Politics at Health Agencies and the Emerging Democratic Train Wreck
Remember when the Democratic partisans and the media (but I repeat myself) complained that President Trump and his Administration were politicizing important health agencies, like the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Good times!
“’I’ve been following health regulatory decisions for decades and have never seen this amount of White House arm twisting to force agencies like FDA and CDC to make decisions based on political pressure, rather than the best science,’” said Jerome Avorn, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, who decried the ‘routine policy distortions we now see nearly every week,’” exclaimed in an August 2020 op-ed in the Washington Post (also appearing in other newspapers) during the Covid pandemic.
Then there’s Dr. Richard Besser, a former CDC director who now is CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in New Jersey. Here’s what he told the taxpayer-funded Public Broadcasting System (PBS) “News Hour” two years ago (July 14, 2020):