How the world’s premier public-health agency was handcuffed

IN 2014 TOM FRIEDEN, the head of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), appeared almost daily to brief the public about the Ebola virus, the last pandemic to hit the United States before the coronavirus. His agency formulated policy for dealing with Ebola, and also embodied it. The CDC trained 6,500 people in America and 25,000 in West Africa to look after victims. The vaccine that finally treated the disease was tested in a CDC laboratory. The end of the outbreak confirmed the agency as the world’s leading public-health body.

Contrast that with what has happened during the coronavirus outbreak. On May 17th a senior White House official, the director of trade policy, said the CDC “really let the country down”. The administration gutted CDC guidelines telling restaurants, child-care centres and others how to reopen, reducing them from more than 50 pages to six. The CDC has been muzzled, says Jeremy Konyndyk of the Centre for Global Development, a think-tank. It has held no public briefings since mid-March. Meanwhile, the first testing kits that the World Health Organisation is distributing came from Germany.

What used to be America’s most prestigious public-health body has been relegated to one voice among many in the clamour of the White House. The result is to squander expertise, compound confusion about...