In the year of our Lord 2024, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is still living in its own bubble-wrapped world of safetyism, and neither presidential candidate is going to do anything to reform it.
News broke this week that California and Oregon “surprised” health officials by breaking with the CDC on COVID quarantine guidelines. The two Democratic-run states finally changed their guidelines to advise people who had COVID but no symptoms that they could still live their normal lives. That seems late, but it is worth noting that the CDC still believes the opposite: Since 2021, the agency has maintained that anyone with COVID, regardless of whether they have symptoms or not, must isolate themselves for five days and wear a mask for 10.
That isolation includes isolating from other people in your own home, including using a separate bathroom if possible. The CDC’s guidance during and after the pandemic was used to justify school closures, which continued to be a regular occurrence in some areas even last year and will continue to loom over students and parents going forward as the CDC still tries to push people into isolation for a virus that we have a vaccine for and does not pose serious risks to people who are healthy and not elderly.
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And neither the CDC nor its policies will be reformed given the state of the presidential race. President Joe Biden put two terrible directors in charge of the CDC and oversaw a lackadaisical response that encouraged schools to remain closed in the first years of his presidency. And former President Donald Trump doesn’t want to talk about COVID and the CDC either, given that he handed the last year of his presidency to health bureaucrats who pushed school closures and lockdowns well past the point that we knew they were no longer needed or never necessary in the first place.
The CDC is among the many federal agencies that need to be reformed from top to bottom, given that it is still pushing COVID safetyism as if it was stuck in 2020. Yet voters from both parties have decided that they are just fine without those reforms because neither of the two likely nominees has shown any will or interest in fixing any of the agencies that have done lasting damage to the country as the CDC has.