Public health wins are quiet — the child born healthy, the loved one still safe, the crisis averted, the economy strong. Public health losses, like the nation’s failure to develop an early and accessible diagnostic test for novel coronavirus, are loud. And Sudip Parikh writes in STAT that the CDC needs to bear down and do what it’s done so well in the past.
We couldn’t agree more!
As Parikh writes, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, what has been the nation’s — and arguably the world’s — preeminent public health agency, must shake off its recent failures, steel itself for what is to come, and display the leadership and competence it possesses. We need the CDC to do the kind of essential work it has done in the past, and are pulling for it to do so now against Covid-19.
In the mid-2000s, Congress appropriated more than $1.6 billion to modernize the CDC campus in Atlanta. Local business leaders, including Bernie Marcus, the conservative co-founder of Home Depot, as well as CEOs from UPS, Delta Airlines, the Southern Company, and Cox Enterprises, advocated for this modernization because they saw the economic risk of infectious disease and understood that, when the time came, the CDC would need the capacity to respond, communicate, and lead.
It needs to do more!