President Biden Has Selected Mandy Cohen To Lead The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

"Major priorities for the agency include the reauthorization of a pandemic preparedness measure that expires on Sept. 30, as well as fiscal year 2024 appropriations."

Translation: they want power, and they want money.

She's a bureaucrat in charge of running a bureaucracy.... does anyone see any real change in this picture?

Why yes, she can be worse than Rochelle Walensky! 😏 

From my hero, Alex Berenson:

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/urgent-joe-biden-is-about-to-pick

URGENT: Joe Biden is about to pick the worst possible person to become the next CDC head

Alex Berenson
June 2, 2023

I'm not exaggerating. Dr. Mandy Cohen, the likely choice, is a public health Covid authoritarian and former chief of staff for censorer-in-chief Andy Slavitt.

Just what America needs.

Another Covid hysteric running the Centers for Disease Control.

Proving it has learned all the wrong lessons since 2021, the Biden Administration is about to choose Dr. Mandy Cohen to replace Dr. Rochelle Walensky as director of the Centers for Disease Control.

Cohen shares the same health authoritarian impulses as Walensky. She supported mask and vaccine mandates - and lockdowns even in 2021. But she is apparently more bureaucratically competent, and thus more dangerous, than Walensky.

Cohen is also very close to Andy Slavitt, whom I am suing in Berenson v Biden for his efforts to censor me. Her choice suggests Slavitt still has considerable influence in the Biden Administration two years after officially leaving the White House.

Apparently diversity mandates haven’t hit the CDC yet. Cohen is a lot like Walensky, a nice Jewish* doctor** from the Northeastern suburbs with all the right degrees.

(*I can say it, I’m Jewish)

(**The actual expression is “nice Jewish girl” but I don’t want to get in trouble)

Perhaps the biggest difference is that Cohen is less orange. Not figuratively, literally; Walensky’s skin tone occupies an uncanny valley somewhere between North Africa and Malibu Barbie. But I digress.

(Digression continues. What color is that? It’s not beige, it’s not orange, it’s not brown, it’s not white. Seriously, what color? Ecru? But is ecru a color, or just a world for beige at fancy furniture stores?)

I know, I shouldn’t make of Rochelle Walensky’s skin tone when there is SO MUCH ELSE to make fun her over.

Like that time she told Rachel Maddow that “vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t get sick.” Oops! Or the press conference where she said she was “scared” of Covid. Profiles In Courage, get me rewrite!

But wait. This piece isn’t about the departing CDC director, it’s about the incoming CDC director. The queen is dead, long live the queen.

Stunningly, despite their vast similarities in professional training and life experience, Cohen and Walensky have tons in common.

They both approached Covid by maximizing hysteria and government overreach. Like Walensky, Cohen loves her some face diapers.

In fact, she loves them more than Walensky. In December 2021, Cohen said that “everyone” needed to keep wearing masks. “Even if you’re vaccinated, you should wear a mask,” she said. Even the CDC had dropped its mask requirements for vaccinated people seven months before.

(No, seriously, she LOVES masks.

ALT: I got Tony Fauci sitting on my face. And he’s delicious!)

Besides pushing lockdowns through March 2021, Cohen also threatened legal action against a school district that wanted to drop quarantines and contact tracing - in September 2021, long after Covid’s lack of risk to school-age children became apparent. She pushed jab mandates for health care workers and explicitly tied loosening restrictions to vaccination levels.

In other words, Cohen has heartily supported every authoritarian measure that the last three years have proven useless. Of course, to the White House, her views are a feature, not a bug. And the Biden Administration seems to believe she will be able to make the CDC even more willing to follow its lead.

“White House officials were drawn to Cohen’s track record of leadership at the federal and state level, said people familiar with the process who spoke on the condition of anonymity,” the Washington Post reported. “That’s a stark contrast to Walensky, who was in her first leadership role in government.”

As Slavitt told the Post: “What the CDC needs now is what Mandy Cohen brings… I’ve worked with her as close as anyone and if she’s the choice, the country is in for a treat.”

Let’s all try not to choke.

Truly cringe-worthy!

Here's a palate-cleanser of sorts - ideas on how to limit the CDC.

https://brownstone.org/articles/the-cdc-as-we-know-it-has-to-go/

... Second, and more fundamentally, I wondered what structural reforms might turn the CDC into the agency that I had imagined before COVID. Here, my mind kept turning to thoughts about an agency that stands out as an example of good government: the National Transportation Safety Board. The NTSB is respected nationwide, and around the globe, for its skill, transparency, and reliability in investigating significant travel accidents, determining their causes, and proposing recommendations for new safety practices and regulations. The NTSB’s work has made enormous contributions to improvements in transportation safety over the years, and its reports can be real page-turners. 

A critical component to the NTSB’s success is that it has no regulatory authority. In 1967, Congress established it as an independent agency within the Department of Transportation. The idea was that “a single organization with a clearly defined mission could more effectively promote” transportation safety. However, Congress soon recognized that the only way to assure the NTSB’s independence was to move it outside of the DOT, so in 1974 Congress reestablished it as a separate agency. 

Agencies charged with regulating transportation, such as the FAA, have to consider economic factors and the promotion of transportation in addition to safety. This cost/benefit responsibility can sometimes leave the FAA vulnerable to regulatory capture, as we saw with the 737-MAX catastrophe. The NTSB’s independence and its lack of regulatory authority, by contrast, give it the freedom to focus on fact-finding and to make recommendations, without being subjected to such pressures. 

It would behoove Congress to consider a similar approach to restructuring the CDC. We need a federal public health agency that is just like the NTSB, one that is strictly charged with fact-finding and with making recommendations, but without any regulatory authority of its own. This would require moving the CDC out of HHS. The new CDC would have a limited role of investigating the causes and sources of infectious disease, and to make recommendations for how to address them, but without any regulatory authority that, as we have learned, could subject the agency to political pressure and regulatory capture. 

Consider the fact that we still do not know for certain where COVID originated. Was it a lab leak, or the result of zoonosis? The NIH, which funded risky gain of function research in Wuhan, is also part of HHS. Had the CDC been taken out of HHS and given independent investigative powers, including the power to audit HHS’s research funding practices, there is a fair chance that we would know the answer to that. We would also likely have a series of dispassionate recommendations on what to do about preventing future occurrences. 

If COVID proved anything, it is that we desperately need a federal agency like this. If Congress is serious about restoring trust in public health, it would do well to consider such a reform.

Brant C. Hadaway is a seasoned, bilingual (English/Czech) attorney focusing his practice on international commercial disputes, contracts, and regulatory compliance on behalf of foreign and domestic clients in the U.S. and abroad.