Obama CDC Boss Who Admired China’s Response Put in Charge of Contact Tracing
Two years ago, the NYPD was frog-marching Thomas Frieden, Obama's former CDC boss, with his hands cuffed behind his back after he was charged with third-degree sexual abuse and forcible touching. Frieden had been accused of groping a female friend, but was shortly released without bail on his own recognizance, pled guilty to disorderly conduct, and had the charged sealed and dismissed. And that shouldn’t have been surprising. Not only had Frieden headed New York City’s Health Department for seven years, going to war against fat and big sodas, but he had remained a close Bloomberg ally. And the billionaire was a major funder of Vital Strategies, Frieden’s public health organization.
Now Governor Cuomo has announced that New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut will be launching a tri-state contact tracing program. “Mike Bloomberg has volunteered to help us develop the program," Cuomo, whose policies may have killed over 5,000 nursing home residents, tweeted. "It will be expensive, challenging & require an army of tracers." Bloomberg’s presence means that Vital Strategies and Frieden will be at the center of the undertaking. Before going on to run the CDC under Obama, Frieden had served as the Director of Global Health for Bloomberg Philanthropies even while working as Bloomberg’s Health Commissioner. When Frieden was arrested for allegedly groping a woman's buttocks, Vital Strategies CEO Jose Luis Castro had eagerly come to his defense. “I have known and worked closely with Dr. Frieden for nearly 30 years and have seen firsthand that he has the highest ethical standards both personally and professionally,” Castro insisted. “In all of my experiences with him, there have never been any concerns or reports of inappropriate conduct.”
That is to say, Frieden had stayed above the waist with Castro when both men had worked at New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, and now at the helm of Vital Strategies. Both Frieden and Castro had started out small, Frieden as a community organizer at Vanderbilt, and Castro, who had a BA in Political Science from Pace and an MPA in administration from UPenn, as a lecturer on political science at Pace. Both had traveled the same road through New York's Department of Health, the World Health Organization, and then Bloomberg’s billion-dollar philanthropic empires. Should either man have a major role in contact tracing millions of people in the tri-state area? Both officials had been tasked with fighting tuberculosis. During Frieden's tenure as New York’s director of the Bureau of Tuberculosis Control, the Health Department announced that it would detain patients who didn’t voluntarily complete treatment for tuberculosis on Roosevelt Island, the former home of the infamous Blackwell's Penitentiary, where they would remain for up to a year under guard on the island.
Frieden said at the time that he had no idea how many patients would require long-term detention. Previously, 50 people had been detained with average stretches in the medical joint of over a month. Back then, I was in high school. I had tested positive for TB with a skin test. I later learned that TB skin tests have such a high false positive rate that they’re highly dubious. But nonetheless, I was prescribed a high dose of antibiotics. I remember feeling weak and collapsing on the couch every evening after taking them, unable to get homework done or even stay awake for more than an hour after being dosed. I never finished the endless course of treatment, but didn’t end up under guard at Blackwell’s either. Frieden left New York City's battle with tuberculosis, which his own department's numbers showed was largely coming from third world immigrants, to work for WHO. Castro continued serving as the Director of Operations for the Bureau for another two years. Frieden returned as Bloomberg’s Commish to wage war on soda and fat, before heading off to mismanage infectious disease policy on a national level.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/05/obama-cdc-boss-who-admired-chinas-response-put-daniel-greenfield/