| Now that his second appointee to head the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has resigned under a cloud, it is well past time for the President to appoint a serious reformer to run the embattled agency. Yesterday Brenda Fitzgerald, MD, resigned after Politico revealed she was trading Merck and other drug company stocks, which are regulated by CDC, and Japanese tobacco company stock, after she was appointed to head the agency. She had replaced Dr. Tom Price, who resigned after his extensive use of chartered private jets on the taxpayers’ dime became public. Both were political and public health insiders not likely to rock any boats.
Please click on the Take Action link to send an email to the White House, and please call the White House, and let the staffer know that you want the President to appoint a serious reformer who will begin to drain the swamp at the CDC.
White House: (202) 456-1111
The CDC is a mess of conflicts of interest, scandal, and ineptitude that seriously undermines confidence in the agency and achieving vitally important public health goals. Among the many issues the new head of the CDC needs to tackle:
- Why does an agency that generates screaming headlines nationally over a handful of mumps or measles cases offer complete silence on the skyrocketing numbers of children with autism?
- Why are eight-year old data used in the CDC’s main autism epidemiology project, the Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring (ADDM) Network?
- The CDC sells billions of dollars worth of vaccines every year through the Vaccines for Children program. An agency can’t regulate a product they sell.
- The CDC owns dozens of vaccine patents. An agency can’t regulate a product they own. The federal government needs to divest these patents.
- The CDC is an old-fashioned federal agency that has the mutually contradictory tasks of both regulating vaccine safety and maximizing consumption of these highly profitable products. One agency can’t do both. That’s why the old Atomic Energy Commission was split into the Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the National Transportation Safety Board was split away from the Federal Aviation Administration. Obviously, an agency can’t investigate it’s own failures. Vaccine safety evaluation must be split away to a new agency like the NRC or NTSB outside the control of the existing vaccine industry apparatus.
- Why after 8 years is indicted embezzler and CDC autism researcher Poul Thorsen still living openly in Denmark? And why are the obviously fabricated studies conducted under his direction still used as a basis for US autism policy?
- We need a serious public investigation of the allegations made by CDC scientist William Thompson of an internal cover-up of findings of significantly higher autism among different groups of children, including African-American boys, who got the MMR.
- The CDC Foundation solicits “donations” to subsidize CDC operations from the very corporations the CDC is supposed to regulate. Imagine if the Securities and Exchange Commission took private “donations” from Wall Street banks via a “foundation.” Institutional bribery and the CDC foundation must go.
The deficits at the CDC go on and on. We don’t have space to list them all here.
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