Nanny Stater Nominated for CDC

President Obama has picked New York City Health Commissioner Thomas Frieden to head up the Centers for Disease Control. He's a crusader, and not always using solid science in the process:

Dr. Frieden, a 48-year-old infectious disease specialist, has cut a high and sometimes contentious profile in his seven years as New York’s top health official under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. He led the crusade to ban smoking in restaurants and bars, pushed to make H.I.V. testing a routine part of medical exams, and defended a program that passes out more than 35 million condoms a year.

At the C.D.C., he will inherit a host of immediate and long-term problems, including a looming decision about whether and how to produce a swine flu vaccine. Health experts say the agency must resolve serious morale and organizational issues even as the administration struggles to overhaul the nation’s health care system.

“I think the administration selected Tom Frieden because he can take public health to a new place,” said Jeffrey Levi, executive director of Trust for America’s Health, a nonprofit public health advocacy organization. “He’s a transformational leader.”

Dr. Frieden is expected to take office next month. With his appointment, which does not require Senate confirmation, New York City will have former commissioners in two of the nation’s most visible health positions; Dr. Margaret A. Hamburg, who held the job in the 1990s, is nearing confirmation as commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration.

Dr. Frieden has long been expected to be Mr. Obama’s choice, and although he is widely admired in the public health community, some C.D.C. veterans began lobbying in recent weeks on behalf of the agency’s acting director, Dr. Richard E. Besser.

Frieden has been behind quite a few dubious nanny stater policies, and it also takes Frieden away from New York City even as it deals with another outbreak of suspected swine flu that has shuttered three New York City public schools.

Perhaps most damaging is the fact that Frieden caused a panic a few years ago when claiming that there was a supervirulent version of HIV that didn't respond to treatments. It turned out that he was wrong, but Frieden continues pushing the envelope. Frieden rammed through a ban on trans fat, which is based on dubious science and conclusions:

Of course, the piece-de-resistance of Frieden’s reign is his successful campaign to ban the use of trans fat -- an artificial food ingredient found mostly in margarine, pastries, and fried foods -- in all of the city’s restaurants. In the months leading up to the ban’s December 2006 approval by the city council, Frieden took every opportunity to brand trans fats as a “dangerous” and “unnecessary” part of the city’s food supply.

Unsurprisingly, the reality of the situation is a bit more complex. Some businesses -- especially smaller outfits -- have struggled to find a replacement that’s just as cheap as trans fat without sacrificing food quality. Case in point: O’Neil Whyte, a baker in Harlem, told The New York Times in December 2006 that “things without trans fat are harder to get and more expensive.”

What’s more, a widely-touted justification for the ban -- fighting obesity -- is specious at best. Trans fat bears almost no relationship with rising obesity rates, and isn’t acutely dangerous like, say, arsenic or lead. Plus, trans fat’s natural substitutes aren’t any healthier, according to not only the National Academy of Sciences, but also the federal Department of Health and Human Services and the Food and Drug Administration. The American Heart Association has warned that the trans fat ban has the "potential for unintended and adverse consequences, such as restaurants returning to the use of oils high in saturated or animal-based fat if healthier oils are in short supply."

Of course, this completely fits the mold that President Obama hopes to accomplish through government.