CREEPING DOUBTS ABOUT GOVERNMENT: ' ... It is quite disturbing to witness the eagerness among some governors to outdo one another by announcing shutdowns that extend beyond where anyone claims to know that shutdowns will be necessary.'.

• Author: Arnn, Larry P.

I HAVE BEEN president of Hillsdale College for 20 years and, during that time, we have had 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, and now the COVID-19 pandemic--so, we are pretty well prepared for whatever comes. The same cannot be said for the Federal agencies assigned to protect the public health. As 1 write, I am not confident that 1 know whether all of the economic shutdowns in the U.S. are necessary to stop the virus.

Every hour, 1 read some authoritative person saying yes, and the next hour 1 read some authoritative person saying no. What I am confident about is that we were not prepared for this pandemic, and yet we spend an enormous amount of money on a centralized bureaucracy that now operates top down, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Food and Drug Administration, National Institutes of Health, and other agencies to Hillsdale, Mich., and tens of thousands of other communities.

Why didn't we have testing kits early on, which seems to have been one of the keys to South Korea's success in dealing with the virus? Why didn't we have masks? Why didn't we have ventilators? I am told that our national stockpile of these things was depleted during the swine flu pandemic of 2009 and never built back up; that there has been an unsuccessful push to produce a stockpile of ventilators going back to the end of the second Bush Administration and extending through Pres. Barack Obama's two terms, and that the FDA has delayed production recently by taking five years to approve a new ventilator design. There is no doubt that there are many people at fault but, above all, the blame lies with the bureaucratic form of government that has developed in our country since the 1960s.

To take just one example, the CDC was created in 1942 as the Office of National Defense Malaria Control Activities, and in 1946 was renamed the Communicable Disease Center. For many decades, it focused its full efforts on its original mission: viruses and communicable diseases, but by the 2000s, the CDC, like most executive agencies, largely had become independent of political control and lost its focus. It had widened its work to include chronic diseases and addictions, nutrition, school health, injuries, and--a telltale sign of ideological corruption and mission creep--racial and ethnic approaches to community health. It is a logical fact that, if you favor some people, you must disfavor others.

In 2007, the late Sen. Tom Coburn (R.-Okla.) issued a well-documented report entitled, "CDC Oft Center." It was a "review of how an agency tasked with fighting and preventing disease has spent hundreds of millions of tax dollars for failed prevention efforts, international junkets, and lavish facilities, but cannot demonstrate it is controlling disease."

In the years since, there have been reports documenting multi-million dollar CDC studies on topics like the prevention of gun violence, how parents should discipline children, and chronic health conditions among lesbian, gay, and bisexual populations.

In 2017 alone, the CDC spent more than $1,100,000,000 on chronic disease prevention and health promotion, $285,000,000 on injury prevention, and $215,000,000 on environmental health--all purposes that are addressed by other Federal agencies. That money could have been used to prepare for communicable diseases, including replenishment of our stockpile of masks and ventilators. In other words, it could have been used to do the work the CDC was created to do.

The Communist government of China, where the coronavirus originated sometime last fall, deserves the harshest criticism at the very least for allowing the crisis to get out of control. As is now well known, Li Wenliang, the doctor who first sounded the alarm about the virus' outbreak in Wuhan (and who subsequently died of the virus), was disciplined by the Chinese government for "spreading...