(NewsNation Now) — A former White House COVID-19 official said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is not prepared for another pandemic.
Dr. Brett Giroir, former White House COVID-19 Testing Czar, is a pediatrician and a former admiral in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps. He was a member of former President Donald Trump’s Coronavirus Task Force.
“The CDC can’t be in charge [of another pandemic],” he said. “It has to be at a much higher level because this is not just about controlling the infection, this is preserving our liberty, our economy, mental health … all the things that need to be done at a higher, integrative level.”
Giroir’s comments come after a bombshell report from Johns Hopkins University that said lockdowns in the U.S. and Europe had very little impact in reducing deaths from COVID-19.
“We find no evidence that lockdowns, school closures, border closures, and limiting gatherings have had a noticeable effect on COVID-19 mortality,” the researchers wrote.
In fact, the lockdowns reduced the potential total number of COVID-19 deaths by about 0.2%, the study found.
However, Giroir noted that the sacrifices many people across the world took to stop deaths associated with COVID-19 were not necessarily in vain.
“It wasn’t that the behaviors … didn’t solve problems or reduced mortality. It’s when you try to force it on people,” he said. “So what the study said is, if you just give people the information, they will act appropriately and do the right things.”
Giroir said the study did not address overall mortality during the pandemic.
“This showed that there was no real effect on COVID-19 mortality. But what it didn’t look at is overall mortality,” he said. “We know that when you lock down the country by mandate, cancer deaths, addiction deaths, suicide deaths all go up. So you had no COVID-19 benefit, but you likely had a tremendous harm to the rest of the public health.”
To date, the United States has recorded 893,907 deaths associated with COVID-19, according to Johns Hopkins University.
A recent CDC study found that in the first month of 2022, COVID-19 killed more Americans than the flu has in the last three years.