Cato Institute Panelists: Yes, The Gag Rules Were Key to the Failures in the Pandemic

This was my question put forth for a December session at the Cato Institute about the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention:

“Over the last 30-40 years there has been a trend in employers banning subordinates from speaking to the press without the authorities’ oversight, often through a public information office. Having covered CDC before and after these controls, I have zero doubt these restrictions were key in the agency’s failures. Given the deadly history of information control, the question is: why wouldn’t they be key to the agency’s failures?”

Ronald Bailey, Science Correspondent for Reason Magazine and adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute, answered: “As a science journalist--science policy journalist--I completely agree with that. Years ago, when I was beginning, I could call up anybody at a federal agency, basically. USDA if I wanted to talk about genetically modified crops, for example, or at the FDA for new treatments, and could get the person on the line who’s the actual researcher and say, ‘So what's going on? Tell me what’s going on.’ And that slowly but surely began to clamp down. It began under the Clinton administration. It got worse and worse over time. And eventually I stopped calling because what happens is that you identify the person who you want to talk to, you call them. They say, ‘I have to get up with my public information officer first.’ Then, the public information officer will say a week later, ‘You can talk to them, but I’m going to be on the line listening.’ And eventually, basically, you had the possibility of independent information coming out of the agencies to a journalist: it just died on the vine. So, I think a lot of people have had this experience in the journalism world. I think it’s terrible. These people are public servants. They should be able to speak to the rest of us as they would any other citizen, in my humble opinion.”

Martin A. Makary, MD, MPH, professor of surgery, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and professor of health policy and management, Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, said, “I think that the quote you read is so key to understanding this pandemic. A leader in [a journalism organization] says that basically tens of thousands of scientists across all these agencies have been gagged. They are not allowed to speak to the media. That is toxic. I mean: that is toxic. In science, that is sort of, you know, the ultimate golden rule that we reserve the right to speak freely about what we believe to be the truth. And so that, I think, was a huge part. Now, I got a chance to talk to so many people who work in agencies: number two, number three, level people, at different departments, and I wrote a piece for Bari Weiss showing that there is not consensus there. When their director gets up there, there are people very high up who are so fed up. They are quitting. They are leaving in droves. They are pissed off. One of them told me that they feel like they’re watching a horror movie and they are forced to keep their eyes open. They couldn’t believe it: ‘I can’t speak.’ A journalist will reach out and the Communications Department at the NIH will say: “We have a media inquiry for you. Tell us what you’re going to tell them and then we will decide whether or not you can do it.” I mean, my parents grew up with state-controlled TV. I think that’s better than what we’re seeing in the NIH.”

Makary, in his last comment for the session said, “Everyone likes to peg what you say as, alright, ‘Are you on my political side or their political side?’….Let’s put all that aside and allow people to speak out freely, namely the many thousands of scientists at the NIH and CDC and HHS who have been gagged from speaking to the public. That is probably the worst poison in our government that persists today. A problem that we can fix, that we have not yet fixed.”

[Makary co-authored the article “U.S. Public Health Agencies Aren’t ‘Following the Science,’ Officials Say,” in The Free Press.]

Time mark: The discussion of the gag rules in the Cato session video begins at about 40.14 minutes.