Abolish the U.S. Surgeon General
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R–S.D.) is under White House pressure to speed the process of confirming President Donald Trump’s nominees, among them Casey Means, the pick for surgeon general. While she has the support of her alma mater, the Stanford School of Medicine, Means is controversial because she lacks an active medical license and has a nontraditional career as a wellness influencer. But before debating whether Means is a good choice for surgeon general, Congress should consider whether the U.S. really needs that often meddlesome office at all or the public health bureaucracy it leads.
The Failure of ‘Public Health’
The term “public health” has come into well-deserved disrepute in recent years because of the overreach of government officials during the COVID-19 pandemic. Panic often drives people to seek salvation from officials eager to exploit opportunities to expand their power. With little scientific basis and no consideration for tradeoffs, governments imposed lockdowns and mask mandates, limited travel, intervened in economies, and otherwise limited our freedom in the name of public health. As I noted in 2021—after Professor Neil Ferguson, a prominent advisor on pandemic policy to Britain’s government, opened up about the sources of his colleagues’ policy ideas—”the public health professionals behind the lockdowns took their inspiration from totalitarian China.”
These interventions made the world poorer, nuttier, and more crime-ridden. Years later, we’re recovering. But some of those ill effects will be with us for a long time to come. George Will wrote two weeks ago that “the coronavirus pandemic is over. What it revealed lingers: intellectual malpractice and authoritarian impulses infecting governmental, scientific, academic and media institutions.”
But public health professionals beclowned themselves long before that one virus spread around the world. As Cato Institute senior fellow Jeffrey Singer, an Arizona surgeon, commented this week, “If confirmed, Dr. Means would not be the first controversial surgeon general. In recent decades, surgeons general have undermined their intended role as public health officials by inserting themselves into issues that extend far beyond the classical liberal conception of ‘public health’: protecting people from harms like infectious disease and pollution that they didn’t consent to.” In the name of public heal
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