spectator.org
Trump Voters Have Had It With the CDC
David Catron
Just as President Trump’s reelection team is being inundated by a tsunami of ticket requests for his first campaign rally since March, the public health bureaucrats who bungled the initial coronavirus outbreak have launched a new campaign of fear-mongering. Last Friday, while Dr. Anthony Fauci cautiously speculated that the country may not see a second wave of COVID-19 cases, the “experts†at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were discussing the possible need for another phase of job-killing “mitigation efforts.†Not coincidentally, the CDC also published new guidelines for large public gatherings that obviously have more to do with hobbling the president’s rallies than public health.
It’s probable that, before the advent of COVID-19, most Americans thought of the CDC as a benign agency where serious scientists worked to protect us from public health threats. During the past few months, the coronavirus pandemic has disabused most sensible observers of that Panglossian fantasy. The CDC is an all-too-typical federal bureaucracy prone to mission creep and turf wars between politically ambitious apparatchiks. It began modestly as the Office of Malaria Control, with a budget of $1 million, but evolved into a bloated bureaucracy with a budget of $8 billion. Inevitably, mission creep distorted the CDC’s original raison d’être and it is now meddling with such things as shaping social norms:
Social norms refer to values, beliefs, attitudes, and/or behaviors shared by a group of people. They are often based on what people believe to be normal, typical, or appropriate. Social norms can function as unspoken rules or guidelines for how people behave, and for how people are expected to behave. People generally follow social norms because they want to fit in.… They contribute to our clothing choices, how we speak, our music preferences, and our beliefs about certain social issues. They can also affect our attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors related to violence.
