“The threat of disease” has become a Trojan horse for surveillance and control. From Brenda Baletti at childrenshealthdefense.org:
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will distribute $260+ million to establish “a National Weather Service, but for infectious diseases” — using mass data collection to predict and control disease outbreaks. But critics warn it will be subject to dangerous errors.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to establish a national “public-private” network to sweep up unprecedented amounts of individual and community data and develop artificial intelligence (AI)-driven models to predict disease outbreaks.
That infrastructure will then help local, state and national health officials identify and implement appropriate “control measures” to manage potential disease outbreaks.
As part of this effort, the agency last week announced an estimated $262.5 million in grant funding over the next five years to establish a network of 13 infectious disease forecasting and analytics centers to coordinate this work across the U.S.
The funding provides roughly $20 million each to 11 universities that were actors in COVID-19 modeling and response. The list includes the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, which oversaw the Event 201 simulation and the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Public Health, where Ralph Baric initiated gain-of-function research.
