The article:
Abolish the CDC and NIH
Did you know that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) spends public money to warn of attacks by hordes of zombies? Really. The program is designed to make some demographic groups more receptive to CDC propaganda—or rather, “messaging.”
But spending our tax dollars on zombie posters, a zombie novel, and zombie history are among the lesser problems at the CDC and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Both of these federal agencies are overgrown, unnecessary, arrogant, infused with leftist politics, and unconstitutional. And both should be abolished.
Recent Revelations: Fauci and Walensky
This past week, Americans were stunned to learn that a long-standing charge was actually true: The NIH funded coronavirus “gain of function” research at the Wuhan lab in communist China. This revelation directly contradicted repeated reassurances by NIH official Anthony Fauci that such funding didn’t happen.
Apart from the issue of misinforming the public (although that’s serious enough), why would a federal agency spend nearly $600,000 in taxpayer money to make a virus more dangerous? Why would it fund anything in communist China—except, perhaps, resistance to that country’s tyrannical government?
Earlier this year, CDC Director Rochelle Paula Walensky issued a decree rewriting every residential landlord-tenant lease in the country. This was outside her statutory authority and in defiance of both the Constitution and the Supreme Court (pdf).
Legal issues aside, consider the sheer hubris: There’s nothing in Walensky’s background to suggest she has any expertise on landlord-tenant law or management. What made her think she knows anything about the subject? What drove her to impose her will on millions of other people?
Fortunately, the Supreme Court promptly voided her order (pdf).
The Constitutional Issue
Every federal elected office holder promises to defend the Constitution as the supreme law of the land. Outside of the capital district and the federal territories, that Constitution assigns no powers to the central government over civilian health care. Further, the Constitution limits the permissible size of the capital district to 10 miles square, so as to prevent federal institutions from metastasizing into state territory and unduly influencing state policy.
The great Chief Justice John Marshall—an advocate of a strong federal government—summarized the Constitution’s position on health care in his famous decision in Gibbons v. Ogden (1824): Reserved exclusively for the states, he wrote, are “health laws of every description” (pdf).
Nevertheless, enabled by rogue Supreme Court rulings issued in panic circumstances during the Great Depression, Congress continues to fund both the CDC and the NIH.
Bureaucracy Run Wild
Over the years, these two agencies have grown into massive bureaucracies. The CDC has nearly 11,000 employees and recently enjoyed a budget of $11.1 billion. That budget is now almost certainly higher. Rather than being located in the capital district, the CDC occupies a campus in Atlanta, Georgia. Except for a museum on the grounds, that campus is closed to the public.
The NIH is not located in the capital district, either. It occupies a lavish main campus in Bethesda, Maryland. The campus is a federal enclave, which means that although it’s within a state, it’s under direct federal control. It’s large enough to house several fitness centers and its own fire department. According to its official directory, the NIH contains 27 separate institutes and centers and a National Library of Medicine. It has 20,000 employees, and in 2020 enjoyed a budget of $42 billion.
The publicity and—for lack of a better word—conceit surrounding these two entities might make you think they’re the only health agencies in the country. Wikipedia, for example, describes the CDC as “the national public health agency of the United States.” This makes it sound as if the United States didn’t have 50 state public health departments and thousands of local public health departments.
Similarly, the NIH Clinical Center identifies itself as “America’s research hospital”—as if America didn’t contain hundreds of other research hospitals funded by state and local governments and by private philanthropy. In addition, the United States has 4,000 degree-granting institutions of higher learning, many of which are involved in health care research, and the pharmaceutical companies also operate a huge health care research sector.