Yahoo Finance Michael Lewis on the CDC: 'It's more like centers for disease observation and reporting'
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) this week commenced a sweeping agency review that will examine the institution's response to the COVID-19 pandemic as well as its ongoing efforts to manage the outbreak.
More than a dozen people close to the CDC told CNN that the agency requires major changes if it aims to respond deftly and effectively next time a pandemic arises.
New York Times best-selling author Michael Lewis agrees. Lewis, whose latest book "Premonition" chronicles the experts who perceived the threat posed by the COVID pandemic in its early days, sharply criticized the CDC during a new interview with Yahoo Finance.
He said the CDC primarily monitors outbreaks rather than controlling them. Political influence on the agency often prevents decisive action, he noted.
"As currently structured, the CDC kind of demonstrated that it wasn't the Centers for Disease Control, it's more like centers for disease observation and reporting," Lewis said.
"They've kind of gotten out of the business of controlling disease," he added. "It's controversial, it's political, it's unpleasant."
"It requires [a] real kind of leadership that they have a hard time providing as a politicized institution," he said.
The CDC has drawn criticism from across the political spectrum for some elements of its COVID-19 response. Last May, the agency lifted an indoor mask mandate but re-imposed the guideline just two months later. The agency took almost two years to acknowledge that N95 masks prevent COVID-19 more effectively than cloth masks.
Defenders of the CDC have noted that scientific research moves slowly because it often requires lengthy studies, and that agency guidelines have shifted appropriately in response to a volatile pandemic.
Last May, President Joe Biden proposed an $8.7 billion budget allotted to the CDC for fiscal year 2022, which marked the largest funding increase at the agency in nearly 20 years, CNBC reported. In turn, the Biden administration budget proposal for 2023, released last month, would boost the agency's budget to $10.6 billion.
Lewis questioned whether the Biden administration has "grappled with the deep issue" of the CDC's ineffectiveness.
"You don't really want to give them $8 billion and say, 'Just you do more of the same,'" Lewis said.
Despite a critical view of the CDC, Lewis lauded a program at the agency that would help predict the timing and location of future disease outbreaks.
"In fairness, inside the CDC, they're trying to build a structure that we should have had long ago, which is kind of like a National Weather Service for disease," he said. "That we should have better predictability."
"It would go a long way to stopping pandemics before they happened," he added. "I'm not sure inside the CDC is the best place to do it."
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