The Public Health Establishment That Flew Too Near to the Sun

American Thinker ^ | 26 Mar, 2023 | Clarice Feldman

[MtnClimber]

The public health establishment, like Icarus on wax wings (in their case, lies, power grabs, political manipulation, rich economic reward), flew too close to the sun and melted their means of staying aloft.

The New Anti-Fauci Legislation

This week Senator Rand Paul and Congressman Chip Roy introduced long-overdue legislation to rein in and reform an out-of-control and counterproductive public health establishment. The bill, entitled the NIH Reform Act would replace the Anthony Fauci-led National Institute of Allergic Diseases (NIAD) with three separate agencies: One to deal with allergic diseases, a second with infectious diseases, and a third to deal with immunologic diseases. Directors of each of these institutes would be subject to Senate confirmation and would serve no more than two five-year terms. No longer would any one person like Fauci be given such overreaching authority (“dictator-in-chief”) for decades. Senator Paul explains, “This will create accountability and oversight into a taxpayer-funded position that has largely abused its power and has been responsible for many failures and misinformation during the Covid-19 pandemic.”

Congressman Roy expanded on the need for this legislation.

From the earliest days of the pandemic, unaccountable public health bureaucracies proved themselves far more adept at ruining lives than saving them. Never again should a single individual, like Dr. Anthony Fauci, wield unchecked power and influence over the lives of the American people.

The legislation is co-sponsored by senators Mike Lee, Marsha Blackburn, Mike Braun, and Josh Hawley.

The Paul-Roy criticisms of Fauci are well-warranted and documented.

[MtnClimber]

Clarice ping

[Wuli]

The entire progressive “rule by experts” (rationale for the administrative state) hinges on an irrational and illogical premise, that, somehow, magically, by mere official appointment, someone is transformed into God when it comes to a position about something, as if there could not possibly be other independent positions equally worthy of hearing from.

Government does not need to appoint experts. It needs people who will go outside of government and get, and make public, a variety of viewpoints, and with the help of others weigh them all and with those others agree on what they admit is not the perfect answer but just best consensus they can come up with. That all needs to be done very publicly, not in closed rooms consisting only of “the experts”.

[DanZ]

The bill, entitled the NIH Reform Act would replace the Anthony Fauci-led National Institute of Allergic Diseases (NIAD) with three separate agencies:
One to deal with allergic diseases,
a second with infectious diseases,
and a third to deal with immunologic diseases.
Directors of each of these institutes would be subject to Senate confirmation and would serve no more than two five-year terms.

This is not a solution - this is MORE BIG G'Ment - My goodness, these elected assholes just keep sticking it to us.

SHRINK the size of the Fed. Departments - reduce their $$$ by 30% each year

[yldstrk]

Agencies have no checks on their authority. Entirely illegal.

[caddie]

This is the point you beat me to.

If NIH and its subset NIAID had its budget cut by 75 % to 90 %, it wouldn't have money enough to create mischief in China with gain-of-function research.

Better yet, if it didn't exist then funding for research would come from the private sector, which it already does in large measure.

[Jim Noble]

It’s the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

[cgbg]

President Eisenhower warned of this in a lesser known part of his military industrial complex speech—most Americans are just beginning to “get it”—many decades later:

https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/eisenhower001.asp

“Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientifictechnological elite.”

[upchuck]

Thanks for the ping MtnClimber.

Clarice Feldman ping.

If you'd like to be on or off the Clarice Feldman ping list, usually issued only on Sunday morning, please click Private Reply below and drop me a FReepmail.

[Wuli]

“Agencies have no checks on their authority. Entirely illegal.”

Past Congresses have somehow not thought it unconstitutional to surrender their sole lawmaking authority to the executive agencies they create, using semantics to call what the agencies do as “regulation” and not “legislation” while ignoring the effects can be as legally binding and as harsh as any “law” could be.

New Congresses can correct that by reversing the sequences by which “regulations” now become law. Any Congress can require “regulations” (every single individual regulation) to begin as no more than proposals, that Congress must take up and process as fully as any other Congressional legislation, passing first through and needing approval of legislative committees before going on to full votes of both houses of Congress. Before doing that Congress can restore many areas (like education & housing for instance) 100% back to the states, and vastly reducing agencies that make “regulations”.