Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo:
To paraphrase Sonny Corleone, during a pandemic we need a wartime CDC. And it’s clear we don’t have one. The institutional apparatus designed for managing ‘ordinary’ infectious diseases, researching and improving care for chronic maladies simply isn’t designed for what we’ve confronted in the last two years.
This was my takeaway from reading Michael Lewis’ The Premonition, which felt both premature and prescient when I read it, too.
In my view, public service involves two, at times competing, calls. One is to leverage expertise. A second is to advocate for the best option. The political part of public service is about making calls — often really tough ones and sometime really unpopular ones — is the face of competing demands.
We’ve put the CDC in the place of having to issue perfect decisions or do the work of political leaders by including the balance in their work.