If you are old enough to vote, you should know that government agencies do not fire entire departments when the White House changes residents. Instead, most are career staffers and it does not matter who the president is, they are doing their jobs, and many do them quite well.

That's why it is bizarre to read the Biden CDC claiming the Trump CDC didn't do its job, when anyone who knows the CDC knows that the people they are blaming are...themselves. Most of them are not political appointees, they are career bureaucrats and scientists - they last for decades. They were at the CDC during the Obama administration, during the Trump years, and are still there now.

But the bureaucrats at the top. Yeah, those change, and that is why you should be wary when someone is lobbing political footballs at predecessors. It is good rhetoric, and will be dutifully written up by People magazine, but data are not on their side. For example, in February of 2020, when UC Davis wanted to find out if a patient had coronavirus, the CDC told them no, they would not send a testing kit until the hospital first proved the patient had it.

You read that right. Welcome to the US government, where it is not about public health, it is about political fiefdoms, and career bureaucrats inside CDC decide when there is a pandemic, not doctors and nurses treating patients during a pandemic.

CDC officials deflecting blame want us to believe the President of the United States told government scientists and doctors to deny it was a worry, when he was the one being called racist because he said it was a worry and we should cut travel from China. It's ridiculous to think so. It is even more ridiculous to believe that when the CDC was finally forced by the White House to send testing kits they sent faulty reagents, making them useless. Yet that is that the CDC now wants Americans to believe.

The proof provided in the latest political theater? None. "That is the feeling that we had, many of us had," said Dr. Anne Schuchat, former CDC deputy. Her complaint was really that after CDC bungled the early parts of the pandemic, responsibility shifted to the White House Coronavirus Task Force and Drs. Deborah Birx and Tony Fauci. The Task Force was formed in January of 2020, when the Trump administration was supposedly ignoring what everyone now claims they saw. Except everyone did not see it. The World Health Organisation was still denying it was a pandemic, they were still repeating Chinese propaganda that the virus could not transmit human to human, and Trump was called a xenophobic reactionary for creating the task force when a Washington state resident got the disease in Wuhan and came back to the US.

This is not a defense of any politician, I didn't vote for President Trump in 2016 or '20, but by March of 2020 I was criticizing CDC yet again because they had showed they are a bureaucracy and not a health agency. They had become so interested in perpetuating their job works program they fabricated new things to panic Americans about to get more funding; a prediabetes epidemic, an opioid epidemic, a vaping epidemic. Name anything and CDC was slapping "epidemic" on it and going to Congressional hearings to testify for money. Trump didn't start that, nor did he create a bureaucratic morass so deep it takes them 6 weeks to tell the public lettuce has E. coli on it and should throw it out. As if anyone has lettuce after six weeks. It is truly useless information CDC pushes out to claim they respond to things.

If CDC wants to be prominent, start doing the job and stop trying to issue control culture, like trying to pass a regulation telling landlords they can't evict people who don't pay their rent because it will cause diseases. That politicization of science was not done by Trump, it was done a few months ago, to try and circumvent Congress, by the Biden administration.

CDC deflecting blame for its part in the pandemic - and their behavior actually got worse this year, not better - would be the same old stuff and just lead to outrage if they didn't risk so many lives. Then it is what we have now; tragic.

America's wish for the New Year should be a CDC that actually promotes Controlling Disease, like in their name, and a lot less about pushing the politics of career bureaucrats who are more interested in criticizing Republicans than they are saving people.