The result is a transfer of wealth from individuals to the for profit health care industry. Only the wealthy have enough assets to survive this process to leave something to their heirs.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43052910 ("CDC cuts expected to decimate Epidemic Intelligence Service (statnews.com)", 58 comments)
Taxpayers are tightening their belt(s).
https://www.cdc.gov/eis/php/participants/index.html
I would be interested in hearing arguments for why it is helpful to gut the CDC’s globally recognized applied epidemiology training program
Anyways, this is a good thing if you want to clean up the mess from very long time, regardless of the party.
Secondly, USA is considered a very unhealthy in comparison to Europe and other countries, while that's mosrly related to FDA, CDC also plays a role here by promoting drugs/vaccines in cases you only need a change of habits (like eating well to minimize flu severity)
Third, the way CDC dealt with COVID was unacceptable, their mixed messages about facemask, social distancing, herd immunity, reapiratory machines caused many people to die, and not because of the virus necessarily. This is a 15k people agency.
And worth to mention their controversy to require social media companies to censor posts about Wuhan Institute of Virology, when we all know today it was true, and CDC was partially responsible of the COVID 19 crisis. Also their censorship of scientists who disagreed with CDC conclusions, and some of them resulted to be factual.
After all of this, I do think it's fair to reform the CDC entirely. The economic impacts of their mistakes destroyed millions of business and caused many people unemployed. Even today 2025 you see few large companies struggling or going bankrupt because of their debt under COVID.
You may think we had to do that to prevent COVID spread, but all current data says the opposite, and many countries who never took hard measures had same or lower spread than US. CDC had to rectify all of their errors.
I have many friends who lost their jobs, VISA or green card process, because CDC was incompetent to act against a virus they previously knew, and recommended things they didn't encourage in the past (like paper/cloth masks to prevent spread of a viral virus).
