After CDC announced that “sweeping” reviews of the agency would be performed to address conflicts and determine where it went wrong in its pandemic response, ICAN sent a request for a copy of the report generated from the review. The document CDC provided in response, however, clearly indicates it has no serious intentions to reform.
Lead Counsel, Aaron Siri, Esq. details the CDC response here:
Due to its incredibly poor performance during the pandemic, the CDC announced that a “sweeping review” of its pandemic performance would be conducted by HRSA official Jim Macrae, who would evaluate the agency’s science and programs, and by internal CDC leaders, who would perform a structural review.
On September 20, 2022, ICAN’s attorneys submitted three FOIA requests to CDC and HRSA seeking information about these reviews and any reports generated from them. In response, CDC directed ICAN to a webpage that contained a summarized version of the report, called the “CDC Moving Forward Summary Report.”
While the “report” was not short on its praise for CDC Director Walensky, boasting that she “did not wait for the start of the review to begin implementing changes” such as “declar[ing] racism as a serious public health threat,” it doesn’t contain anything serious about reforming the agency—such as, for example, promising not to continue to hide information from the American public, ceasing its past practice of twisting data and manipulating studies to show desired outcomes, or committing to cease being a revolving door for pharma employees.
Evidently these health agencies refuse to learn anything from the pandemic! Unfortunately, there is no better evidence of this than the recent appointments of these agencies’ new leaders.
Nowhere is this more perfectly encapsulated than in the newly appointed replacements at our federal health agencies who are as conflicted as ever. It is highly unlikely, for example, that the new CDC Director, Dr. Mandy Cohen, is going to seriously reconsider the CDC’s pandemic response given that she, herself, espoused some of the most extreme positions on masks, vaccines, contract tracing, and lockdowns during her time as North Carolina’s Health Secretary.
At the FDA, David Kaslow, a deeply conflicted Merck vaccine developer, was recently appointed as the replacement for Dr. Marion Gruber, who resigned in protest over the ethics (of all things) of rushing Covid booster shots.
Perhaps even less surprising is President Biden’s nomination of Dr. Monica Bertagnolli to serve as the NIH director despite the fact that Dr. Bertagnolli appears to have received more than $323 million in research funding from pharmaceutical companies. It is almost as if our government is trying to put the most conflicted “medical” professionals in charge of national public health policy.
Rest assured however that ICAN will continue to pick up the slack where these agencies are failing and will continue to hold their feet to the fire.
See below for ICAN’s work holding our health agencies to task for their conflicts:
To support our legal efforts, click here to donate!
