The Coming Plague

While Democrats are obsessed with protecting people from their own bad but enjoyable habits, describing even small vices as "epidemics" the CDC itself has become flaccid. In Reason's May issue (subscribers only) Jacob Sullum "An Epidemic of Meddling:The totalitarian implications of public health:

Established during World War II as a unit of the U.S. Public Health Service charged with fighting malaria in the South, the CDC today includes eight different centers, only two of which deal with the control of infectious disease.

The other six are apparently concerned with improving us, whether we like it or not.

Today they're warning about drug-resistant gonorrhea. And even some well-educated and well-heeled consumers have been lulled into complacency and haven't vaccinated their kids.

Sen. Dick Durbin and the Democrats nanny-state command and lawyerly control is crippling our ability to develop the drugs we need to protect ourselves. Peter Huber, WSJ "The Coming Plague":

Before thalidomide, when microbes were still the enemy, drugs got the benefit of the doubt. After, the unknown cure was officially more dangerous than the known disease. And thus, going forward, all new medicines would have to be examined very closely. There was no need to rush. Medicine didn't need Texas-Ranger drugs any more. The stunningly fast, violent and random bandits of disease -- smallpox, cholera, tuberculosis, typhoid and the rest -- were history.

But they weren't.

Germs are always future, always reinventing themselves in their ingeniously stupid and methodically random way. They have also contrived, of late, to get human sociopaths to add thought and order to the reinventing. When they get lucky, we won't be ready; for all practical purposes, getting ready was outlawed in 1962. [snip]

Germs no longer need to be smarter than our scientists, just faster than our lawyers.

So let's look at some realistic and useful alternatives. And be cognizant of yet another cautionary tale of giving so much power over our health care to lawyers and government bureaucrats. It's a matter of life and death.