Daily Wire Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro warned Americans Friday that the Centers for Disease Control‘s (CDC) announcement of a “shake-up” really just means the agency wants more power.
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky admitted earlier this week that her department made mistakes in its response to the COVID pandemic and then called for a “reset” that would include staffing changes and faster data releases, the Associated Press reported.
Shapiro wasn’t buying that the CDC was serious about taking steps toward meaningful change. “If you actually wanted to shake-up the CDC, what you would do is use a little bit of epistemic humility. You’d actually look at their system and say, okay, what if we shrank what it is that we say that we can do?” he told his listeners on “The Ben Shapiro Show.”
“But that’s not what the CDC is doing,” Shapiro explained. “Their argument is they need more power. Their big mistake is that they weren’t forceful enough during the last pandemic. So when they say shake-up, what they mean is give us more power.”
Walensky told CBS News that her agency needs to learn from the lessons of the pandemic and “do better.” Among the suggested steps for a CDC shake-up was creating a “new office to promote equity in healthcare” and developing a “more nimble workforce that can quickly respond to public health crises.”
The CDC director said the agency needs “to have a special forces, if you will, to deploy during pandemic times.”
The massive health agency currently has more than 11,000 employees and a $12 billion budget.
Shapiro lambasted the idea that the CDC needs to focus on “equity in health care,” saying the agency has no business promoting equity. He went on to explain that the changes the CDC wants are nothing short of a power grab coming from an agency that already used a large amount of power throughout the course of the pandemic.
“The notion that the CDC was not active enough during this pandemic is pretty insane … it’s like the Federal Reserve, the people who botched the response are the same people who are charged with fixing it,” Shapiro remarked.
The segment concluded with Shapiro reminding listeners that those in control of institutions like the CDC have completely different motives than the American people they are supposed to serve. He suggested that scientific institutions have been compromised by politics, making them ideological stalwarts and turning them away from simply telling the public about its objective findings.
“The institution of science has brought about more progress and prosperity than any institution over the course of the last century, and yet they are continuously undermining themselves with questions of motive and injecting politics and ideology,” Shapiro said.