Month: June 2022

Substantive Due Process Right to Privacy in Medical Information

The Supreme Court hasn’t made clear whether such a constitutional right to be free from government disclosure of private information (as opposed to the indubitably existing right to be free from unreasonable searches), even setting aside the Dobbs debate; see NASA v. Nelson (2011). But some lower courts have recognized it, see, e.g., Marsh v. County of San Diego (9th Cir. 2012), and this morning’s decision by Judge Matthew Kennelly (N.D. Ind.) in Logan v. City of Evanston follows Seventh Circuit precedent on this point:

… Evanston Police Chief Demitrous Cook … published onto his personal Snapchat story several photos of individuals who were of interest in Evanston police investigations. Cook also published these individuals’ dates of birth and last known addresses. Some of the individual photos had comments like “in custody” or “DOA” (dead on arrival) handwritten next to the image. The word “pending” appeared next to Logan’s identifying information, and “HIV” was handwritten next to his image…. Social media users who saw Cook’s story subsequently shared the photos and personal information on Facebook and through text messages. Days later on February 22, Logan took an HIV test, which was negative, to rebut the perceived public belief that he might have HIV.

On February 21, 2020, after Cook was informed that the pictures had been shared by members of the public, he removed them from his Snapchat story and issued a public statement regarding the incident. He stated that the individuals whose information he shared were subjects previously identified in Evanston Police Department investigations and that the photos were taken to assist him with an investigation. He further stated that he did not realize that photos taken with the Snapchat app could be made public with a single click. The Evanston city manager suspended Cook for three days because of the incident….

The court allowed Logan to proceed on his substantive due process right to privacy claim:

The Seventh Circuit has “recognize[d] a constitutional right to the privacy of medical, sexual, financial, and perhaps other categories of highly personal information” under the Fourteenth Amendment. Wolfe v. Schaefer (7th Cir. 2010). This protection extends to medical “information that most people are reluctant to disclose to strangers.” Accordingly, Logan’s claim is based on Cook’s public disclosure of his supposed HIV status on Snapchat without his permission….

Cook contends that because Logan was not actually HIV positive and did not have a pending HIV test, the “pending” and “HIV” text above and next to his photo did not actually contain confidential information subject to constitutional protection. In other words, Cook says that he is claimed to have published false medical information about Logan and that this does not amount to actionable publication of private medical information under the Fourteenth Amendment according to Supreme Court precedent.

See Paul v. Davis (1976) (concluding that defamation by a municipal employee was not actionable under Fourteenth Amendment).

Cook’s argument amounts to the proposition that if a public official discloses personal medical information about an individual that is accurate, the official violates the Constitution, but if he discloses false medical information about an individual, he does not. This is a Catch-22 argument that does not carry the day. First of all, Cook’s reliance on Paul v. Davis is misplaced. In that case, the Supreme Court emphasized that the plaintiff’s claim did not touch upon “a sphere contended to be ‘private'”; rather, the plaintiff’s claim was premised on the state publicizing an official arrest record. Here, in contrast, Logan’s claim involves information falling squarely within a private sphere….

At bottom, a government official can infringe a person’s right to keep his medical information private even if the medical information the official discloses about him is false. The Court concludes that a reasonable jury could find that Cook violated Logan’s due process rights in publishing the photo and the text next to it.

Cook’s argument for qualified immunity also falters on the clearly established prong. To demonstrate that a right was clearly established at the time of the alleged violation, either Supreme Court or Seventh Circuit precedent must exist that would have put the official on notice.”A right is clearly established when it is ‘sufficiently clear that every reasonable official would have understood that what he is doing violates that right.'”

Qualified immunity “does not require a case directly on point for a right to be clearly established, [but] existing precedent must have placed the statutory or constitutional question beyond debate.” The law was clearly established by February 2020 that there is a substantive due process right to medical privacy. The Seventh Circuit “has outlined a clearly established ‘substantial’ right in the confidentiality of medical information that can only be overcome by a sufficiently strong state interest.” Though not controlling for the purpose of notice or precedent, this case is similar to Grimes v. County of Cook (N.D. Ill. 2020), in which this Court’s colleague, Judge Gary Feinerman, overruled on a motion to dismiss a defense of qualified immunity asserted in response to a claim based on a government official’s public disclosure of the plaintiff’s private transgender status. Logan’s HIV status is confidential medical information just as Grimes’s transgender status was, and governing precedent put Cook on notice that publicly sharing such information could violate the Fourteenth Amendment. Because Cook has not offered a countervailing state interest that would otherwise justify disclosure, he is not entitled to summary judgment based on qualified immunity.

And the court rejected Logan’s state law defamation claim:

“Illinois courts have long held that executive branch officials of state and local governments cannot be civilly liable for statements within the scope of their official duties.” The sole consideration regarding the [absolute] immunity’s scope is “‘whether the statements made were reasonably related’ to the official’s duties,” meaning the immunity can cover defamatory statements.

Logan and Cook disagree over whether Cook was acting within the scope of his official duties. Cook points out that he was investigating a crime and taking photos of persons potentially involved in the crime and contends this falls within the authority of a police chief. Logan, in contrast, characterizes the incident more narrowly and focuses on the fact that the photos were published on Cook’s personal Snapchat account.

Logan’s characterization of the incident disregards the surrounding context. All that is necessary for immunity to attach is that the statements were “reasonably related” to the officer’s authority. Logan does not dispute that the photos “were job related as part of the investigation that Cook was conducting.” This concession is dispositive.

The Court concludes that Cook is entitled to absolute immunity under state law on Logan’s defamation claims against him.

The court rejected Logan’s race discrimination claim:

Logan, who is Black, has not provided evidence of Cook’s intent to discriminate based on race…. Although Cook only published photos of Black men, the undisputed facts show that this was because all of the men under investigation in the particular case were Black. Logan’s assertion that Cook also had mugshots of white individuals but chose not to publish them is not supported with a citation to any evidence, nor has the Court found any support for the assertion in the record….

And the court rejected “Logan’s Fourth Amendment claim because that constitutional provision does not provide a general right to privacy.”

The post Substantive Due Process Right to Privacy in Medical Information appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest https://ift.tt/x3yEL6t
via IFTTT

Substantive Due Process Right to Privacy in Medical Information

The Supreme Court hasn’t made clear whether such a constitutional right to be free from government disclosure of private information (as opposed to the indubitably existing right to be free from unreasonable searches), even setting aside the Dobbs debate; see NASA v. Nelson (2011). But some lower courts have recognized it, see, e.g., Marsh v. County of San Diego (9th Cir. 2012), and this morning’s decision by Judge Matthew Kennelly (N.D. Ind.) in Logan v. City of Evanston follows Seventh Circuit precedent on this point:

… Evanston Police Chief Demitrous Cook … published onto his personal Snapchat story several photos of individuals who were of interest in Evanston police investigations. Cook also published these individuals’ dates of birth and last known addresses. Some of the individual photos had comments like “in custody” or “DOA” (dead on arrival) handwritten next to the image. The word “pending” appeared next to Logan’s identifying information, and “HIV” was handwritten next to his image…. Social media users who saw Cook’s story subsequently shared the photos and personal information on Facebook and through text messages. Days later on February 22, Logan took an HIV test, which was negative, to rebut the perceived public belief that he might have HIV.

On February 21, 2020, after Cook was informed that the pictures had been shared by members of the public, he removed them from his Snapchat story and issued a public statement regarding the incident. He stated that the individuals whose information he shared were subjects previously identified in Evanston Police Department investigations and that the photos were taken to assist him with an investigation. He further stated that he did not realize that photos taken with the Snapchat app could be made public with a single click. The Evanston city manager suspended Cook for three days because of the incident….

The court allowed Logan to proceed on his substantive due process right to privacy claim:

The Seventh Circuit has “recognize[d] a constitutional right to the privacy of medical, sexual, financial, and perhaps other categories of highly personal information” under the Fourteenth Amendment. Wolfe v. Schaefer (7th Cir. 2010). This protection extends to medical “information that most people are reluctant to disclose to strangers.” Accordingly, Logan’s claim is based on Cook’s public disclosure of his supposed HIV status on Snapchat without his permission….

Cook contends that because Logan was not actually HIV positive and did not have a pending HIV test, the “pending” and “HIV” text above and next to his photo did not actually contain confidential information subject to constitutional protection. In other words, Cook says that he is claimed to have published false medical information about Logan and that this does not amount to actionable publication of private medical information under the Fourteenth Amendment according to Supreme Court precedent.

See Paul v. Davis (1976) (concluding that defamation by a municipal employee was not actionable under Fourteenth Amendment).

Cook’s argument amounts to the proposition that if a public official discloses personal medical information about an individual that is accurate, the official violates the Constitution, but if he discloses false medical information about an individual, he does not. This is a Catch-22 argument that does not carry the day. First of all, Cook’s reliance on Paul v. Davis is misplaced. In that case, the Supreme Court emphasized that the plaintiff’s claim did not touch upon “a sphere contended to be ‘private'”; rather, the plaintiff’s claim was premised on the state publicizing an official arrest record. Here, in contrast, Logan’s claim involves information falling squarely within a private sphere….

At bottom, a government official can infringe a person’s right to keep his medical information private even if the medical information the official discloses about him is false. The Court concludes that a reasonable jury could find that Cook violated Logan’s due process rights in publishing the photo and the text next to it.

Cook’s argument for qualified immunity also falters on the clearly established prong. To demonstrate that a right was clearly established at the time of the alleged violation, either Supreme Court or Seventh Circuit precedent must exist that would have put the official on notice.”A right is clearly established when it is ‘sufficiently clear that every reasonable official would have understood that what he is doing violates that right.'”

Qualified immunity “does not require a case directly on point for a right to be clearly established, [but] existing precedent must have placed the statutory or constitutional question beyond debate.” The law was clearly established by February 2020 that there is a substantive due process right to medical privacy. The Seventh Circuit “has outlined a clearly established ‘substantial’ right in the confidentiality of medical information that can only be overcome by a sufficiently strong state interest.” Though not controlling for the purpose of notice or precedent, this case is similar to Grimes v. County of Cook (N.D. Ill. 2020), in which this Court’s colleague, Judge Gary Feinerman, overruled on a motion to dismiss a defense of qualified immunity asserted in response to a claim based on a government official’s public disclosure of the plaintiff’s private transgender status. Logan’s HIV status is confidential medical information just as Grimes’s transgender status was, and governing precedent put Cook on notice that publicly sharing such information could violate the Fourteenth Amendment. Because Cook has not offered a countervailing state interest that would otherwise justify disclosure, he is not entitled to summary judgment based on qualified immunity.

And the court rejected Logan’s state law defamation claim:

“Illinois courts have long held that executive branch officials of state and local governments cannot be civilly liable for statements within the scope of their official duties.” The sole consideration regarding the [absolute] immunity’s scope is “‘whether the statements made were reasonably related’ to the official’s duties,” meaning the immunity can cover defamatory statements.

Logan and Cook disagree over whether Cook was acting within the scope of his official duties. Cook points out that he was investigating a crime and taking photos of persons potentially involved in the crime and contends this falls within the authority of a police chief. Logan, in contrast, characterizes the incident more narrowly and focuses on the fact that the photos were published on Cook’s personal Snapchat account.

Logan’s characterization of the incident disregards the surrounding context. All that is necessary for immunity to attach is that the statements were “reasonably related” to the officer’s authority. Logan does not dispute that the photos “were job related as part of the investigation that Cook was conducting.” This concession is dispositive.

The Court concludes that Cook is entitled to absolute immunity under state law on Logan’s defamation claims against him.

The court rejected Logan’s race discrimination claim:

Logan, who is Black, has not provided evidence of Cook’s intent to discriminate based on race…. Although Cook only published photos of Black men, the undisputed facts show that this was because all of the men under investigation in the particular case were Black. Logan’s assertion that Cook also had mugshots of white individuals but chose not to publish them is not supported with a citation to any evidence, nor has the Court found any support for the assertion in the record….

And the court rejected “Logan’s Fourth Amendment claim because that constitutional provision does not provide a general right to privacy.”

The post Substantive Due Process Right to Privacy in Medical Information appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest https://ift.tt/x3yEL6t
via IFTTT

“SCOTUS Rejects Negligence Standard in ‘Pill Mill’ Cases”

From T. Markus Funk (a legal scholar, former prosecutor, and my erstwhile coauthor) at Sean Solis, both at Perkins Coie, in Bloomberg Law:

The US Supreme Court issued a significant decision in its Controlled Substances Act (CSA) jurisprudence as applied to the nation’s opioid epidemic. At issue in Ruan v. United States was the requisite intent the government must prove to convict a physician under the CSA for the unlawful distribution of controlled substances.

In a significant win for the defense, specifically, and those concerned about imposing criminal liability based on mere negligence, more generally, the Supreme Court held that “[a]fter a [physician] produces evidence that he or she was authorized to dispense controlled substances” (a given in almost every case), “the Government must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant knew that he or she was acting in an unauthorized manner, or intended to do so.”

In reaching this holding, the high court unanimously rejected the government’s position. In its briefing, the government argued that it should be allowed to convict a physician merely by showing that he or she acted “objectively unreasonably” in misprescribing opioids. In other words, under the government’s requested standard, federal prosecutors would de facto only have to show that a prescribing physician acted with negligence. (Notably, this scienter requirement would be lower than the standard necessary to convict a drug trafficker for distributing heroin or cocaine—namely, “knowingly or intentionally.”) …

The post "SCOTUS Rejects Negligence Standard in 'Pill Mill' Cases" appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest https://ift.tt/Qwp6jGo
via IFTTT

Nowhere To Hide From The Collapse Of The Everything Bubble

Nowhere To Hide From The Collapse Of The Everything Bubble

Authored by Nick Hubble via Fortune & Freedom,

We’re told not to put all our eggs in one basket. The idea is that each basket performs differently at different times. During a crash, at least some of your portfolio is supposed to hold up.

But what do you do when all the baskets get hit by the same earthquake?

Usually, when stocks are crashing, bonds surge. But this time, bonds have performed even worse than stocks by some measures!

Property, a favourite hedge for inflation because of its tax advantages and the leverage used to buy it, is plunging too.

Gold is fairly flat, especially in currencies other than the US dollar. But it’s supposed to surge at times like this.

Utilities stocks are a favourite defensive investment, but they’re being hammered by disruption and government intervention like price caps.

Bank stocks are supposed to benefit from rising interest rates. But not this time. There’s a panic over interest rates going too high too fast for their customers.

Basic necessities like food are caught up in supply chain and fertiliser and energy chaos. So those stocks are struggling too.

Energy stocks are performing quite well, but the government is intent on crushing the most important parts of their businesses in coming years.

Commodities keep booming and busting erratically and they’re not usually a good way to play market crashes. I suspect a lot of the commodities boom is explained by underinvestment, which only makes commodity producers look profitable in the short term because they’re not spending money on new projects. In a few years’ time, they won’t have enough revenue.

Cash is outperforming most investment classes lately, which is incredibly ironic given the surge in inflation…

The point is, there’s nowhere to hide from this sell-off. The story we’ve been fed for decades about diversification is not proving to be true so far. Everything is falling together.

Why is that the case, though? What has gone wrong?

Well, central bankers and governments intervened so heavily in the economy that they created an everything bubble. Even the mainstream media figured this out on the way up… which is very unusual.

But what was the everything bubble? Well, all asset prices were bid up to lofty levels.

Bonds went into negative nominal yields, which is another way to say that their prices were bid up to such absurd levels that investors were guaranteed to lose money.

Property prices went berserk as interest rates hit zero because debt became so cheap.

Stocks without earnings reached ridiculous market capitalisations.

Tech stocks went into a repeat of the tech bubble.

Cryptocurrencies soared.

Pundits like Dave Portnoy made a career from claiming that stocks only go up.

But what goes up on a wave of central bank stimulus must come down, regardless of inflation and a bear market. As the economist Ludwig von Mises explained, it’s only a matter of time and severity:

There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.

Japan is currently testing the theory.

In simple English, central bankers pumped up the market to such highs that they must all fall now that central bank stimulus is being withdrawn.

Previously such price action – the boom and the bust – applied to isolated sectors of the market like property in 2006, tech stocks in 1999, Asian stocks in 1996 and so on. But this time, we’re in the Everything Bubble: the central bankers had pumped up everything. And so, everything must come down together, whatever the economic and financial conditions might be.

Another explanation is that the combination a recession and inflation is a rare one which is bad for all asset classes. Remember, inflation and recession are supposed to be mutually exclusive.

Economists simply presumed this to be the case until the 1970s.

Investments which rely on a hot economy are falling because of a recession and investments which rely on low inflation are falling as prices surge.

The thing is, both measures are yet to get a lot worse. The Bank of England’s latest forecast is for inflation to top 11%. And a recession is only just emerging as a consensus forecast.

The market rout may be only the beginning.

Here is one last thing before you go.

I received some comments about Monday’s article which explained the difference between true inflation and a supply shock. I thought of a much better explanation than the 1,000 words it took on Monday. It’s a simple question:

Is the oil price rising because of inflation? Or is inflation rising because of the oil price?

It’s not just oil, of course. But you get the idea. Our inflation is being driven by commodity prices rising and not the other way around. That means it could end very abruptly, or true inflation could be yet to emerge.

Tyler Durden
Tue, 06/28/2022 – 12:25

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/rg6lUhv Tyler Durden

“SCOTUS Rejects Negligence Standard in ‘Pill Mill’ Cases”

From T. Markus Funk (a legal scholar, former prosecutor, and my erstwhile coauthor) at Sean Solis, both at Perkins Coie, in Bloomberg Law:

The US Supreme Court issued a significant decision in its Controlled Substances Act (CSA) jurisprudence as applied to the nation’s opioid epidemic. At issue in Ruan v. United States was the requisite intent the government must prove to convict a physician under the CSA for the unlawful distribution of controlled substances.

In a significant win for the defense, specifically, and those concerned about imposing criminal liability based on mere negligence, more generally, the Supreme Court held that “[a]fter a [physician] produces evidence that he or she was authorized to dispense controlled substances” (a given in almost every case), “the Government must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant knew that he or she was acting in an unauthorized manner, or intended to do so.”

In reaching this holding, the high court unanimously rejected the government’s position. In its briefing, the government argued that it should be allowed to convict a physician merely by showing that he or she acted “objectively unreasonably” in misprescribing opioids. In other words, under the government’s requested standard, federal prosecutors would de facto only have to show that a prescribing physician acted with negligence. (Notably, this scienter requirement would be lower than the standard necessary to convict a drug trafficker for distributing heroin or cocaine—namely, “knowingly or intentionally.”) …

The post "SCOTUS Rejects Negligence Standard in 'Pill Mill' Cases" appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest https://ift.tt/Qwp6jGo
via IFTTT

Are You Applying for a Concealed Carry License Post-Bruen, in …

These were the “may-issue” jurisdictions in which such licenses were generally unavailable; if you’re applying there (and outside the counties which were apparently de facto shall-issue, such as Sacramento, San Bernardino, and Riverside Counties in California, as well as some rural counties), let me know what you’re seeing of the process. Are you seeing general compliance by the licensing authorities? Obstructionism? Manageable but annoying red tape? Likewise, if you apply a few weeks from now, please e-mail me at volokh at law.ucla.edu to let me know.

I’m inclined to apply for a concealed carry permit in L.A. County, but that would require buying a specific concealed carry gun (I’m not sure I’d want to use my current handgun, which is pretty heavy) before even starting the process, since the particular carry weapons’ descriptions and serial numbers have to be listed on the application. Given the press of other business, it will probably take a bit of time for me to figure out what I want and buy it; I’ll get going on the application after that.

The post Are You Applying for a Concealed Carry License Post-<i>Bruen</i>, in … appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest https://ift.tt/dRhwNSu
via IFTTT

Are You Applying for a Concealed Carry License Post-Bruen, in …

These were the “may-issue” jurisdictions in which such licenses were generally unavailable; if you’re applying there (and outside the counties which were apparently de facto shall-issue, such as Sacramento, San Bernardino, and Riverside Counties in California, as well as some rural counties), let me know what you’re seeing of the process. Are you seeing general compliance by the licensing authorities? Obstructionism? Manageable but annoying red tape? Likewise, if you apply a few weeks from now, please e-mail me at volokh at law.ucla.edu to let me know.

I’m inclined to apply for a concealed carry permit in L.A. County, but that would require buying a specific concealed carry gun (I’m not sure I’d want to use my current handgun, which is pretty heavy) before even starting the process, since the particular carry weapons’ descriptions and serial numbers have to be listed on the application. Given the press of other business, it will probably take a bit of time for me to figure out what I want and buy it; I’ll get going on the application after that.

The post Are You Applying for a Concealed Carry License Post-<i>Bruen</i>, in … appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest https://ift.tt/dRhwNSu
via IFTTT

COVID-19 Exposed the Truth About the CDC


CDC logo_shattered

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was once widely viewed as the gold standard in public health, considered an apolitical, science-driven bulwark against all pathogen threats, foreign and domestic.

Today, trust in the agency has plummeted because COVID-19 exposed the truth: The CDC is thoroughly corruptible, and federal regulators will never be impartial experts. They respond to political incentives just like everyone else, and a fact-driven, purely technocratic state is an impossible dream.

The Trump administration pressured the CDC to narrow the scope of testing so case counts would drop, blocked officials from doing interviews, and edited its flagship scientific reports. The CDC provided a scientifically dubious public health rationale for rejecting migrants at the southern border. President Joe Biden continued that policy, and under his purview, CDC guidance on school closures was surreptitiously written by leaders of the country’s second-largest teachers union.

Tom Frieden, a former CDC director, co-authored a 2021 op-ed with three other former agency heads expressing hope that Biden’s incoming CDC Director Rochelle Walensky would “restore the public’s confidence in the CDC’s scientific objectivity,” with its reputation “a shadow of what it once was.” Yet, Frieden endorsed large-scale protests against racial injustice two months after writing in The Washington Post that “the faucet of everyday activities needs to be turned on slowly. We cannot open the floodgates.” Meanwhile, public health officials were keeping people from attending the funerals of their loved ones.

And could it be pure coincidence that the CDC chose the Friday before President Biden’s State of the Union address to drop its indoor mask recommendation for the majority of Americans, even though the supporting data were months old?

In other words, it doesn’t matter who occupies the White House—political incentives mean that, no matter how dedicated or competent the career scientists who work at the CDC are, the agency will never be controlled by fact-driven experts shielded from the “hurry and strife of politics,” as Woodrow Wilson wrote. After decades of mission creep, the CDC’s role should be strictly narrowed, limited to surveillance and coordination, leaving the heavy lifting to local officials and private and academic researchers who are more reactive to direct feedback from their communities.

In 2007, former agency director James Mason noted that of course, the CDC is “going to have some political oversight and political influence…It’s inherent and necessary.” But he stressed that it’s the responsibility of CDC leadership to stand up to political interests when needed.

During the pandemic, that didn’t happen. Not only did the agency consider political factors when making what were most often presented as purely science-based decisions, but officials frequently hid, ignored, or distorted legitimate data either out of incompetence or to appease their political bosses.

The CDC has also been a superspreader of COVID misinformation. To justify universal mask mandates, Walensky spent months citing a junk study on their efficacy in schools, exaggerating the risks of breakthrough infections among the vaccinated, and misrepresenting a study on outdoor COVID transmission, according to its author.

The CDC claimed the delta variant was as transmissible as chickenpox, which isn’t true—it turns out the agency had used inaccurate data from a New York Times infographic. It also promoted an infographic on cloth masks using data that were not statistically significant. Meanwhile, the CDC has not run a single randomized controlled trial on the efficacy of masking since the beginning of the pandemic.

In the vaccine rollout, the CDC told the elderly they needed to wait in line behind essential workers, including young and healthy school support staff, corporate tax lawyers, and magazine fashion editors. In its noble zeal to convince parents to get their children vaccinated, the CDC used old data that the agency knew were no longer valid to falsely claim hospitalizations were rising among adolescents; it misrepresented a study to exaggerate the dangers faced by unvaccinated children, and it falsely claimed that kids who get COVID are more likely to develop diabetes.

Under both the Trump and Biden administrations, the CDC publicly cast doubt on the value of N95 masks, vaccines, and diagnostic tests at times when there were supply shortages or when it was politically expedient. Both presidents even used the CDC to exert federal control over state-level housing policy, repeatedly extending an unconstitutional ban on evictions based on junk science.

Nor is this laundry list of blunders and machinations that put politics ahead of public health unusual for the modern CDC, an agency that began as a post-World War II effort to eradicate malaria in the United States but now is in charge of investigating everything from car accidents to sports injuries to gun violence to teen vaping. Despite having a budget that is 14 times larger than it was in the late ’80s, today’s CDC is less prepared than ever to address its founding purpose: controlling infectious diseases.

Once the politicians in charge learn that they can gain influence and funding for pet issues by couching them as important for Americans’ health, there is no end to what arenas they will task public health officials with asserting control over.

The CDC was once a poster child for the movement by many federal entities starting in the 1970s toward an approach known as “regulatory science,” which aimed to create impartial standards for regulatory action that would be evidence-based and apolitical, and therefore trustworthy and consistent. But none of these reforms changed the underlying incentives of the CDC or other agencies or of their political overseers. The public choice implications remained the same: Politicians want to look good to voters; bureaucrats depend on politicians for their job; and so bureaucrats will do what it takes to make politicians look good, no matter how unmoored from objective data a particular favored policy may be.

Political concerns also ensure that the CDC is structurally incentivized to be overly cautious, making its officials slow to act in a crisis and reluctant to look outside the agency for help. This is what led to the CDC’s greatest blunder at the beginning of the pandemic, when it banned academic, private, and nonprofit laboratories from developing diagnostic tests, delaying their arrival by at least two months and leaving both government and private scientists blind to the spread of the virus. When the agency finally released its own test, it was poorly designed, prone to contamination, and inaccurate.

None of this was unpredictable. Even after the CDC got a chance to stress-test its crisis response during the H1N1 or “swine flu” virus outbreak of 2009, it failed to address known shortages of N95 masks, ventilators, and other critical medical equipment, partly due to political interference by the Obama administration. In an even more recent harbinger of what was to come, during the Zika virus outbreak starting in 2016, the CDC mishandled the development of a diagnostic test while shutting out commercial manufacturers.

So how do we stop another predictably disastrous response before the next pandemic? Even serious proposals that address the CDC’s problems by adding on more layers of oversight and red tape are doomed from the start. These attempts only add greater scope for lobbyists and politicians to exert influence and exploit loopholes. Such reforms miss the fundamental reality that centralizing control over public health, especially at the federal level, necessarily results in sclerosis, risk aversion, and mission creep.

Today we can see the costs in thousands of lives lost unnecessarily, and Americans are finally fed up. But the pandemic did not create this reality, it simply exposed it.

We can look to examples of localized, distributed public health systems in other countries that proved themselves during the pandemic. Consider what the outcome might have been here if the CDC hadn’t monopolized testing early on and instead taken a cue from its South Korean counterpart. After confirming their first four COVID-19 infections, health officials there rushed to work with biotech companies on a diagnostic test and were able to deploy it within a single week.

In Germany, government health authorities partnered with private labs around the country to create a broad testing network early on, and rapid tests were available in vending machines while the U.S. was still struggling through supply shortages. Perhaps most importantly, countries whose public health authorities were transparent and maintained the public’s trust have seen higher rates of voluntary participation in vaccination and other efforts to stem the community spread of the virus.

CDC veteran Martin Cetron has warned colleagues for years of a phenomenon he terms a “bankruptcy of trust,” when people no longer place their faith in public officials, allowing speculation and misinformation to fill the void. Now that the pandemic is functionally over, it’s clear that the CDC has long been on the path toward its utter failure to plan for or competently address the foundational reason for its existence. And Americans have good reason to rethink their confidence in the federal government’s ability to protect their health.

Written and produced by Justin Monticello. Edited by Isaac Reese. Graphics by Reese, Tomasz Kaye, and Nodehaus. Audio production by Ian Keyser.

Music: “Robotic Butterflies” by Evgeny Bardyuzha; “We Fall” by Stanley Gurvich; “Free Radicals” by Stanley Gurvich.

Photos: BSIP/Newscom; BSIP/Newscom; Sarah Silbiger/UPI/Newscom; Shawn Thew – Pool via CNP/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Alex Edelman/ZUMA Press/Newscom; SMG/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Simon Shin/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Michael Brochstein/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Adam Schultz/White House/Newscom; Brazil Photo Press / SplashNews/Newscom; Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Newscom; Polaris/Newscom; Jonathan Alpeyrie/Polaris/Newscom; Aimee Melo/dpa/picture-alliance/Newscom; Julian Stratenschulte/dpa/picture-alliance/Newscom; Sven Hoppe/dpa/picture-alliance/Newscom; CNP/AdMedia/Newscom

The post COVID-19 Exposed the Truth About the CDC appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest https://ift.tt/MG7IytH
via IFTTT

COVID-19 Exposed the Truth About the CDC


CDC logo_shattered

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was once widely viewed as the gold standard in public health, considered an apolitical, science-driven bulwark against all pathogen threats, foreign and domestic.

Today, trust in the agency has plummeted because COVID-19 exposed the truth: The CDC is thoroughly corruptible, and federal regulators will never be impartial experts. They respond to political incentives just like everyone else, and a fact-driven, purely technocratic state is an impossible dream.

The Trump administration pressured the CDC to narrow the scope of testing so case counts would drop, blocked officials from doing interviews, and edited its flagship scientific reports. The CDC provided a scientifically dubious public health rationale for rejecting migrants at the southern border. President Joe Biden continued that policy, and under his purview, CDC guidance on school closures was surreptitiously written by leaders of the country’s second-largest teachers union.

Tom Frieden, a former CDC director, co-authored a 2021 op-ed with three other former agency heads expressing hope that Biden’s incoming CDC Director Rochelle Walensky would “restore the public’s confidence in the CDC’s scientific objectivity,” with its reputation “a shadow of what it once was.” Yet, Frieden endorsed large-scale protests against racial injustice two months after writing in The Washington Post that “the faucet of everyday activities needs to be turned on slowly. We cannot open the floodgates.” Meanwhile, public health officials were keeping people from attending the funerals of their loved ones.

And could it be pure coincidence that the CDC chose the Friday before President Biden’s State of the Union address to drop its indoor mask recommendation for the majority of Americans, even though the supporting data were months old?

In other words, it doesn’t matter who occupies the White House—political incentives mean that, no matter how dedicated or competent the career scientists who work at the CDC are, the agency will never be controlled by fact-driven experts shielded from the “hurry and strife of politics,” as Woodrow Wilson wrote. After decades of mission creep, the CDC’s role should be strictly narrowed, limited to surveillance and coordination, leaving the heavy lifting to local officials and private and academic researchers who are more reactive to direct feedback from their communities.

In 2007, former agency director James Mason noted that of course, the CDC is “going to have some political oversight and political influence…It’s inherent and necessary.” But he stressed that it’s the responsibility of CDC leadership to stand up to political interests when needed.

During the pandemic, that didn’t happen. Not only did the agency consider political factors when making what were most often presented as purely science-based decisions, but officials frequently hid, ignored, or distorted legitimate data either out of incompetence or to appease their political bosses.

The CDC has also been a superspreader of COVID misinformation. To justify universal mask mandates, Walensky spent months citing a junk study on their efficacy in schools, exaggerating the risks of breakthrough infections among the vaccinated, and misrepresenting a study on outdoor COVID transmission, according to its author.

The CDC claimed the delta variant was as transmissible as chickenpox, which isn’t true—it turns out the agency had used inaccurate data from a New York Times infographic. It also promoted an infographic on cloth masks using data that were not statistically significant. Meanwhile, the CDC has not run a single randomized controlled trial on the efficacy of masking since the beginning of the pandemic.

In the vaccine rollout, the CDC told the elderly they needed to wait in line behind essential workers, including young and healthy school support staff, corporate tax lawyers, and magazine fashion editors. In its noble zeal to convince parents to get their children vaccinated, the CDC used old data that the agency knew were no longer valid to falsely claim hospitalizations were rising among adolescents; it misrepresented a study to exaggerate the dangers faced by unvaccinated children, and it falsely claimed that kids who get COVID are more likely to develop diabetes.

Under both the Trump and Biden administrations, the CDC publicly cast doubt on the value of N95 masks, vaccines, and diagnostic tests at times when there were supply shortages or when it was politically expedient. Both presidents even used the CDC to exert federal control over state-level housing policy, repeatedly extending an unconstitutional ban on evictions based on junk science.

Nor is this laundry list of blunders and machinations that put politics ahead of public health unusual for the modern CDC, an agency that began as a post-World War II effort to eradicate malaria in the United States but now is in charge of investigating everything from car accidents to sports injuries to gun violence to teen vaping. Despite having a budget that is 14 times larger than it was in the late ’80s, today’s CDC is less prepared than ever to address its founding purpose: controlling infectious diseases.

Once the politicians in charge learn that they can gain influence and funding for pet issues by couching them as important for Americans’ health, there is no end to what arenas they will task public health officials with asserting control over.

The CDC was once a poster child for the movement by many federal entities starting in the 1970s toward an approach known as “regulatory science,” which aimed to create impartial standards for regulatory action that would be evidence-based and apolitical, and therefore trustworthy and consistent. But none of these reforms changed the underlying incentives of the CDC or other agencies or of their political overseers. The public choice implications remained the same: Politicians want to look good to voters; bureaucrats depend on politicians for their job; and so bureaucrats will do what it takes to make politicians look good, no matter how unmoored from objective data a particular favored policy may be.

Political concerns also ensure that the CDC is structurally incentivized to be overly cautious, making its officials slow to act in a crisis and reluctant to look outside the agency for help. This is what led to the CDC’s greatest blunder at the beginning of the pandemic, when it banned academic, private, and nonprofit laboratories from developing diagnostic tests, delaying their arrival by at least two months and leaving both government and private scientists blind to the spread of the virus. When the agency finally released its own test, it was poorly designed, prone to contamination, and inaccurate.

None of this was unpredictable. Even after the CDC got a chance to stress-test its crisis response during the H1N1 or “swine flu” virus outbreak of 2009, it failed to address known shortages of N95 masks, ventilators, and other critical medical equipment, partly due to political interference by the Obama administration. In an even more recent harbinger of what was to come, during the Zika virus outbreak starting in 2016, the CDC mishandled the development of a diagnostic test while shutting out commercial manufacturers.

So how do we stop another predictably disastrous response before the next pandemic? Even serious proposals that address the CDC’s problems by adding on more layers of oversight and red tape are doomed from the start. These attempts only add greater scope for lobbyists and politicians to exert influence and exploit loopholes. Such reforms miss the fundamental reality that centralizing control over public health, especially at the federal level, necessarily results in sclerosis, risk aversion, and mission creep.

Today we can see the costs in thousands of lives lost unnecessarily, and Americans are finally fed up. But the pandemic did not create this reality, it simply exposed it.

We can look to examples of localized, distributed public health systems in other countries that proved themselves during the pandemic. Consider what the outcome might have been here if the CDC hadn’t monopolized testing early on and instead taken a cue from its South Korean counterpart. After confirming their first four COVID-19 infections, health officials there rushed to work with biotech companies on a diagnostic test and were able to deploy it within a single week.

In Germany, government health authorities partnered with private labs around the country to create a broad testing network early on, and rapid tests were available in vending machines while the U.S. was still struggling through supply shortages. Perhaps most importantly, countries whose public health authorities were transparent and maintained the public’s trust have seen higher rates of voluntary participation in vaccination and other efforts to stem the community spread of the virus.

CDC veteran Martin Cetron has warned colleagues for years of a phenomenon he terms a “bankruptcy of trust,” when people no longer place their faith in public officials, allowing speculation and misinformation to fill the void. Now that the pandemic is functionally over, it’s clear that the CDC has long been on the path toward its utter failure to plan for or competently address the foundational reason for its existence. And Americans have good reason to rethink their confidence in the federal government’s ability to protect their health.

Written and produced by Justin Monticello. Edited by Isaac Reese. Graphics by Reese, Tomasz Kaye, and Nodehaus. Audio production by Ian Keyser.

Music: “Robotic Butterflies” by Evgeny Bardyuzha; “We Fall” by Stanley Gurvich; “Free Radicals” by Stanley Gurvich.

Photos: BSIP/Newscom; BSIP/Newscom; Sarah Silbiger/UPI/Newscom; Shawn Thew – Pool via CNP/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Alex Edelman/ZUMA Press/Newscom; SMG/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Simon Shin/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Michael Brochstein/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Adam Schultz/White House/Newscom; Brazil Photo Press / SplashNews/Newscom; Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Newscom; Polaris/Newscom; Jonathan Alpeyrie/Polaris/Newscom; Aimee Melo/dpa/picture-alliance/Newscom; Julian Stratenschulte/dpa/picture-alliance/Newscom; Sven Hoppe/dpa/picture-alliance/Newscom; CNP/AdMedia/Newscom

The post COVID-19 Exposed the Truth About the CDC appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest https://ift.tt/MG7IytH
via IFTTT

ECB To Launch “First Line” Of Bond Crash Defense On Friday, Same Day QE Ends

ECB To Launch “First Line” Of Bond Crash Defense On Friday, Same Day QE Ends

For all those curious what the ECB’s “anti-spread tool”, meant to bring soaring Italian yields tighter in a time of rising rates and QT even as Europe scrambles to offset record inflation by tightening financial conditions (as discussed most recently in “The ECB Has A Huge Dilemma: Price Stability Or Bail Out Nations“), we got a small update earlier today when ECB President Christine Lagarde said that the central bank will activate one part of the bond-purchasing firepower it’s earmarked as “a first line of defense” against a possible debt-market crisis this coming Friday… which just “coincidentally” happens to be the day the ECB’s QE ends!

“We have decided to apply this flexibility in reinvesting redemptions coming due in the PEPP portfolio as of 1 July,” Lagarde said Tuesday in a speech in Sintra, Portugal, where the ECB is holding its annual retreat.

“We will ensure that the orderly transmission of our policy stance throughout the euro area is preserved,” she said. “We will address every obstacle that may pose a threat to our price-stability mandate.”

As Bloomberg notes, the availability of pandemic reinvestments has been touted as an initial crisis-fighting tool since December, though the ECB didn’t choose to resort to that option until an emergency meeting on June 15 that followed a surge in Italian yields.

Unfortunately, that’s as much detail as we are going to get, because once again there was generous use of the word flexibility”, this time in the context to how reinvestments from the ECB’s €1.7 trillion ($1.8 trillion) pandemic bond-buying portfolio are allocated, and which will be aimed at curbing unwarranted turmoil in government bonds as interest rates are lifted from record lows to curb unprecedented inflation.

In other words, just as we jokingly suggested some time ago, the ECB will do QT on even days, QE on odd ones.

Meanwhile, adding to the QE now, QT tomorrow confusion, net buying under the ECB’s original asset-purchase program is also set to end on Friday, exposing the euro zone’s more-indebted nations to speculative attacks by investors, similar to the blowout in Italian yields already observed at the start of June.

But wait, there’s more, because while Europe is desperate for deflationary gale force winds to blow away the runaway inflation that has put an end to the ECB’s various easing deus ex machinas, many are convinced that the ECB is hiking into yet another recession which will be triggered by Russia which continues to cut off energy supplies, while there are also doubts in the ECB’s ability to avoid investor panic as it raises rates for the first time in a decade.

Following Lagarde’s statement, Italian bonds trimmed declines, narrowing the 10-year yield premium over its German counterpart — a key gauge of risk in the region — by six basis points to 192 basis points, the lowest since Thursday.

The ECB is also working on a new bond-buying instrument to tackle the same issue — known as fragmentation — and is expected to announce something in the coming weeks. Lagarde said the tool will allow rates to rise “as far as necessary,” complementing efforts to stabilize inflation at the 2% target — a quarter of the current level.

Of course, that will never happen and instead the moment the details of the “anti-fragmentation” mechanism are revealed and the market realizes just how powerless the ECB is, yields and spreads will blow out to multi-year highs.

Addressing the same event in Portugal, Governing Council member Martins Kazaks said he thinks “sterilization” to nullify the stimulative effect of bond purchases “should be part of the instrument.” The tool “should be a backstop,” used only when urgently needed, he said.

However, since there is no such thing as a deus ex machina, the moment the ECB unveils the specifics and details is when the next crisis begins, and the ECB knows that very well.

Separately, while describing the risk of a recession in the 19-member euro area as “non-trivial,” Kazaks said rates can be raised “quite quickly” and called front-loading hikes — including a possible July move beyond the planned quarter-point — “reasonable.”Lagarde backed the ECB’s base case for next month, but stressed the path for steady rate increases could be accelerated if price pressures worsen.

What the ECB should be worried about is how fast it will cut rates after its rate hikes spark the next recession and whether rates will hit a new record negative yield one year from today/

Tyler Durden
Tue, 06/28/2022 – 12:00

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/WBAwagu Tyler Durden