That would be a good place to start if Centers for Disease Control & Prevention is to regain trust of the American people.

To be sure, most Americans have not followed the sad tale of the CDC's anti-alcohol posturing over the years, details which we have repeatedly reported.  But CDC Director Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, Wednesday said the agency had botched its response to Covid, caving to White House pressure during the Trump Administration, and announced a major reorganization designed to regain the trust of the American people.

“To be frank, we are responsible for some pretty dramatic, pretty public mistakes, from testing to data to communications,” she said in a video distributed to the agency’s roughly 11,000 employees.

After reviewing a damning report, she said the agency needs to refocus itself on public health needs, respond much faster to emergencies and outbreaks of disease, and provide information in a way that ordinary people and state and local health authorities can understand and use.

In short, it needs to focus on epidemiology, the discipline where it made its mark, becoming known as the "gold standard" for quickly tracking disease.  If the Covid pandemic taught us anything, it is that speed matters in halting the spread of infectious diseases.

But what about alcohol?  Some portion of CDC's budget goes to promoting an anti-alcohol agenda.  That agenda itself has damaged the agenda, leading it to support such anti-science measures as people pretending to be doctors to gather information in emergency rooms, or studies which purported to show that youth exposure to bev/al advertising led to binge drinking later in life.

The bev/al industry itself acknowledges that alcohol is different.  Consumed moderately, often in conjunction with a meal, it offers some protection against the No.1  killer, coronary disease.  But when abused, it becomes a deadly poison.  Alcohol research and policy deliberations belong in a separate agency, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse & Alcoholism.  CDC should leave alcohol to NIAAA and focus on epidemiology of infectious diseases.  Speed in identifying new diseases, in identifying outbreaks, and in tracking spreads saves lives.  

Dr. Walensky hopes to cut down review time for urgently needed studies, emphasizing "data for action" and to change its promotion system to reward employee efforts to make an impact on public health and focus less on the number of scientic papers published.