Hey, America! Hide the donuts!
City Health Commissioner Tom Frieden is off to join the Obama administration, as head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
This deals a heavy blow to Mike Bloomberg’s dream of making New Yorkers healthy in spite of their stubborn selves. Still, we have no doubt that Mayor Nudge’s replacement health czar will be equally committed to free condoms and faux French fries.
Dr. Mary Poppins?
This isn’t to question Frieden’s motives. We’ve had our differences with the doctor, but we’ve never considered him anything but an honorable man.
But there is something profoundly disquieting in public-health policies that require the results of diabetes tests to be transmitted for storage in City Hall databases — to say nothing of sin taxes that generate major-league criminal activity.
Just yesterday, the routine traffic stop of a small U-Haul trailer in Brooklyn yielded untaxed cigarettes worth more than $500,000 — cash that’s all-too-often glommed by organized crime, or even funneled to terrorists overseas.
And then there’s the annoying stuff.
Transfat-free donuts? Please.
Calorie counts at Mickey D’s? Hey, they call it junk food for a reason!
Call us old-fashioned, but public-health properly is about bacteria in the water supply and rats in the restaurants — not government-mandated behavior-modification programs.
Now Frieden’s coercive nostrums will be translated into national policy.
A spoonful of sugar to help the nostrums go down? Sure, but hold the sugar.