My feeling is we can temporarily take away her liberty to make sure she does not infect the rest of us even thought the science is weak that she poses any real risk. Where do you stand on this?

And it is not easy to “re-program” (technical federal budget term) “green” money to spend on “yellow” issues. It only gets done occasionally (maybe only onces, in fact) during a year, only with permission from the Congress, and only if the agency can make a showing that it REALLY needs to do this. If they don’t spend the money, normally it goes back to the Treasury, which is why you see massive spending activities in September.

Our political system was set up to make it hard to get anything done, so the politicians have developed this system of mutual fiscal backscratching where everyone gets to reward their favorite supporters, and since we are such a rich country no one gets hurt or angry.

The issue is the activists and their publicists, who make the politicians look cruel if they don’t support the activist causes. And with our First amendment, nothing can be done about it. And I am not advocating that anything SHOULD be done about it. It is like gravity – it is there – deal with it. Probably the only way to suppress it would be to have every line item appropriation tagged with the name of the congressman who sponsored it, but that will never happen, either.

I would think you probably meant that someone who does not settle one place is unproductive. And I’d wonder what that has to do with the CDC. As a large organization, the CDC is perfectly capable of handling both infectious diseases and other kinds as well. The National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases (one of the CDC’s centers) is focused entirely on diseases like ebola.

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10/24/2014

Name : FRIEDEN THOMAS R
Address : NEW YORK NY
Profession : MEDICINE
License No: 173139
Date of Licensure : 12/02/87
Additional Qualification :
Status : NOT REGISTERED
Registered through last day of :
Medical School: COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY Degree Date : 05/14/1986

If I said to you that “a rolling stone gathers no moss,” what would you think I meant?

While the CDC decides which individual studies take place, Congress exercises considerable control. For instance, the CDC researched sexual assault because 42 USC 280b-4 requires it to research “sexual and domestic violence by and against adults, youth, and children.”

If you think the CDC has been given too much discretion, the answer is to give it less. If you think its mission is too broad, the answer is for Congress to narrow it.

I’m opposed to paternalistic regulations, such as Bloomberg’s absurd large soda ban, but that’s just not what the CDC does. It researches the diseases that Congress tells it to, diseases that happen to kill large numbers of Americans. If that causes the CDC to be marginally less prepared to handle a rare and hard to transmit virus, I’m okay with that.