“Just before the first cases of the novel coronavirus began popping up in the U.S. around this time last year, public-health agencies’ biggest concern seemed to be e-cigarettes. In January 2020, the Food and Drug Administration announced stringent bans on many of these nicotine-vapor products, teenagers’ use of which former FDA director Scott Gottlieb called an “epidemic.” That same month, the Centers for Disease Control ended its months-long recommendation that all Americans avoid e-cigarettes, after mistakenly blaming them for causing several thousand cases of lung injury nationwide. For all this activity, though, the CDC was failing in its core public-health functions. Despite an $11 billion budget, the agency had never produced useful modeling of how a novel virus might spread and be contained. U.S. public health must return to its core function of protecting Americans from transmissible diseases—not from themselves. A downsized CDC should rebrand under its original name, the Communicable Disease Center, and stop trying to control behavioral health decisions like vaping.”
ARTICLE LINK: A Private Fix for Public Health
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