Why would anyone trust the CDC at this point?
I know plenty of people who still seem to trust the CDC, and it’s hard to understand why. “Politics” as an explanation covers a lot of territory and goes a long way towards an answer, but it’s not quite enough to explain why more people wouldn’t acknowledge the wild careenings of the agency in its COVID guidelines and judge the agency itself harshly for it.
It seems like aeons ago, but I once trusted the CDC too. Oh, maybe “trusted” is a bit strong, since I’m somewhat of a natural skeptic and am aware that government agencies are not the most trustworthy entities on earth. Nevertheless, I know there was a time when I thought the CDC was staffed and led by people whose main devotion was to science, and who were fairly competent. Now I have reason to doubt both assumptions.
And so does everyone else. COVID has certainly not been an advertisement for the CDC, right from the beginning when the agency botched the initial testing for the virus. I’m not going to detail the long list of contradictions and reversals in the CDC’s COVID recommendations, but most people probably recall the back-and-forth on masks. Now, as Andrea Widburg points out:
After fervently insisting on continuing in masks even when vaccinated, the CDC made a U-turn so sharp you could see the skid marks shimmering in the air. Henceforth, vaccinated people can abandon their masks. They are, once again, free…
All is not perfect in this allegedly mask-free paradise. Even if you’re vaccinated, you’re still going to have to muzzle yourself “in crowded indoor settings like buses, planes, hospitals, prisons and homeless shelters….” However, among other things, there’s no longer an excuse for teachers to avoid returning to school.
…However, I once again have the feeling I’ve been conned – and that the administration may pull the rug out from under all of us.
Why conned? Because either the vaccination works or it doesn’t. And if it does work, there’s absolutely no reason that everyone in the Biden administration – all people who have been vaccinated for months – have been going around swathed in masks.
I’ve noticed that, since vaccination has been available, even my liberal friends have been ignoring the earlier suggestions from the CDC they seemingly revere, to wear masks no matter what. They therefore have been going maskless outside and even inside with other vaccinated people for quite some time. And yet I bet they would say the CDC is perfectly fine in its pronouncements.
Andrea Widbug points out that either the vaccination works or it doesn’t, and I believe that it works and plan to act accordingly. However, it’s not strictly an either/or proposition. The vaccine supposedly works 90-95% of the time, which means that in a large vaccinated population even some vaccinated people will be susceptible to getting COVID. That’s the way medicine is – it’s not perfect, and in my opinion we need to resume our lives and understand the imperfect nature of prevention and treatment. What’s more, as a greater and greater number of people get vaccinated, the amount of virus circulating will decrease and even unvaccinated people and everyone else will be exposed to it less and less, with a resultant decrease in the chances of getting it.
COVID is hardly unique in these respects. It’s the government’s reaction to COVID that has been unique, and suspect, from the start. As I wrote back in April of 2020, when the pandemic was relatively new:
One of the many lessons of the COVID-19 response is how easily public officials embrace tyranny, and how many people accept it because of fear.
I’m afraid of COVID-19. I’m in a relatively high-risk group, and I’m laying very low. I’ll probably lay low for longer than my state tells me to, but that’s my decision. I didn’t like the initial 2-week shutdown, but I thought I understood the reasons – flatten the curve and keep the health care system from being totally overwhelmed – and I knew it would buy us time to learn more about the illness.
Mission accomplished. It’s been far more than two weeks, and the damage from the shutdown itself has gotten to the point that it becomes crystal clear it needs to be removed. The benefits have been less clear, too. There doesn’t seem to be much evidence that shutdowns mattered all that much in the curve of the COVID-19 toll in various states and various countries. We understand more than we did, but although we don’t understand enough, we have to take a few leaps because one thing we do understand (and was clear from the start, actually) is that the shutdown itself is causing tremendous damage. And that damage is not limited to economics; it involves mental and physical health as well.
Almost six weeks ago I wrote this [March 17, 2020]:
“So here’s my question for all you epidemiologists and infectious disease experts out there –
“Wouldn’t it be better to have only high-risk people stay home? People over 60 and those with pre-existing conditions? That way, if all those at low risk kept mingling, a lot of them would get a mild flu and herd immunity will be achieved fairly quickly, to the benefit of all, without overwhelming the health care system.
“I’m not suggesting this as an actual policy right now, but I’m just wondering if my logic is flawed. I suppose the question is how long would it take for it to run its course and achieve sufficient herd immunity, and when would it be safe for us old folks to finally emerge. Also, would there be a lot of deaths among the younger ones in the meantime?
“I just don’t see the end game for the current mitigation strategies.”
It wasn’t rocket science to question what was happening back then. And that was before the worst of the draconian measures were put in place by governors such as Michigan’s Whitmer, which are not only startlingly strict but seemingly unrelated to any public health goal or logic involving such goals.
What’s going on? People in power like more power, particularly people on the left. Tyrants of all stripes have long used emergency powers to increase their control over the people. Sometimes those emergency powers become semi-permanent or even permanent. It certainly doesn’t surprise me that some governors are trying to stretch it out for as long as possible.
I believe that’s one of the reasons the MSM is trying to stoke fear, and has been doing so from the start. There’s plenty of fear to be had, of course, just from the basic facts of the matter without trying to increase it further. But the MSM is strongly motivated in various ways to do just that: in order to get Trump, to give petty tyrants like Whitmer more reasons to clamp down, and to increase traffic because “if it bleeds it leads.”
The real wild card in all this is how long the people are going to take it.
It’s not as though this wasn’t pretty clear over a year ago. And yet, here we are, very much the worse for wear.
At minimum the CDC has a pretty big messaging problem. It appears that they’re driven by politics first and public health second.
I’ve always suspected that the whole mask thing had little to do directly with stopping or slowing transmission of the virus and far more to do with social engineering in the name of public health. The CDC seems overly concerned with social engineering. It appears as if they’ve been using masks as a constant reminder that the virus is still around. Every time you have to go into a public place you have to wear a mask and everyone else is wearing masks, so you’re constantly thinking about the virus. The thinking being (I assume) that people will adjust there behavior if they’re constantly reminded of the virus, which may perhaps discourage people from engaging in super spreader type event scenarios.
At any rate, I can say that I no longer take anything the CDC proclaims at face value with regards to Covid. I just assume there’s always some ulterior motive beyond just what they’re saying.
For example, them declaring that vaccinated people no longer need to mask up – Why now? What changed? Why did vaccinated people have to wear a mask last week but not this week? Well, one thing I do know is that fewer and fewer people are seeking vaccines these days, and one reason people may be reluctant could possibly be that the CDC was claiming that even the vaccinated still needed to wear masks.
Nobody can know anything because so many people carry the virus without symptoms and the definitive test finds short fragments of non-viable viral RNA, as well as the intact virus.
All we know is that the excess death rates are like 15-18% higher in some areas, but these could be from many causes, not just Covid.
I might fit the category of most at risk. I have type 2 diabetes, tho well controlled by diet., mild copd. Atrial fibralation. So I should have been isolated. However, I work as a driver for Labcorp. All during the summer of 2020 I was picking up and delivering COVID tests, over 14,000. Yep not a sneeze from me.
I got the second shot of Pfizer in February and had side affects immediately, shortness of breathe, acky muscles and joints. Higher than normal blood sugar. It was gone in 2-3 days. I also get a reoccuring staph infection in my leg that can only be treated by anti-biotics. I april I had it reoccur. It was bright red and hurt. The next day the same symptoms I had from the Pfizer shot occured and within 12 hours the infection was almost gone. YUes, I believe the vaccine works.
I haven’t shared Neo’s former trust in the CDC for some time, as the agency has been a classic example of bureaucratic bungling for years. In 2014, the then-director, Tom Frieden, was hauled before Congress to explain why the CDC had shipped anthrax bacilli in a viable rather than deactivated condition, thus exposing some CDC personnel to live bacteria. The official report on the anthrax incident issued in July 2014 acknowledges a second snafu involving avian flu: “While finalizing this report, CDC leadership was made aware that earlier this year a culture of non-pathogenic avian influenza was unintentionally cross-contaminated at the CDC influenza laboratory with the highly pathogenic H5N1 strain of influenza and shipped to a BSL-3 select-agent laboratory operated by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).”
The full report is still available on the CDC website at https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2014/p0711-lab-safety.html
As for the Good Doctor Frieden: “Former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Tom Frieden avoided jail time on Tuesday after pleading guilty to groping a longtime family friend in New York. Frieden, who is also the former New York City health comissioner, turned himself in to police in August 2018 after the woman reported that he had grabbed her butt without her permission inside his Brooklyn apartment, court documents said.
By pleading guilty, Frieden wasn’t required to explain what happened during the October 2017 incident to Brooklyn Criminal Court Judge Edwin Novillo. Frieden was facing up to a year in jail for misdemeanor forcible touching, third-degree sexual abuse and second-degree harassment charges, prosecutors said.”
https://abcnews.go.com/US/cdc-director-pleads-guilty-groping-family-friend-jail/story?id=63478002
Gee, you’d think Hunter Biden was running the CDC . . .
It’s been a really awful, bad news week for Joe Biden. This is meant to take the spotlight off him. A “something shiny” moment for the media to use.
That said, enough of us on the conservative side of things have been saying every single decision was made with the influence of politics at least, if not 100% political. I never trusted the CDC, but my watershed moment was when they more or less said it was OK to protest last summer. I knew then it was all BS.
“The vaccine supposedly works 90-95% of the time, which means that in a large vaccinated population even some vaccinated people will be susceptible to getting COVID.”
Actually, from the CDC’s own numbers from yesterday: 9245 breakthrough cases out of 117million vaccinated. That yields a 0.008% breakthrough rate. A really fantastic statistic for any vaccine. Of course, Cuomo et al, now don’t like “the Science”, so are going to ignore it. Gotta retain their hold over the minions. What a FUBAR this whole thing has been.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/cdc-plans-drop-mask-requirements-fully-vaccinated-people-n1267249?fbclid=IwAR3SL6osBXy77EufVkB8nWvEVDFFI91fHMzxv7CkcibGdbHp0hhuvNHchPM
King Jay of Washington was clearly caught off guard by that announcement yesterday as he had a mixed message of we’re thinking about it to maybe we’ll follow it before finally landing on ‘let’s strongly encourage private businesses to be our vaccine passport enforcers’.
For whatever it’s worth I went to several businesses this morning and saw absolutely no difference in mask usage. I’ve gotten to the point of almost always having it below the nose.
For some years the CDC has been wasting its time and our money working on “gun violence” and “racism” as health problems, instead of focusing on its primary job of infectious disease prevention. I haven’t been surprised by its failures in the past year.
Our governor, Roy Cooper, D, decided to require masks indoors until 67% of adults have received at least one dose of vaccine. He appears to have pulled that metric out of his back pocket. He’s “considering” what to do now that the CDC pulled the rug out from under him.
Trust the CDC?
I trust they’re fully accredited, card carrying members of the Left.
They’re also complicit in mass murder.
}} They therefore have been going maskless outside and even inside with other vaccinated people for quite some time. And yet I bet they would say the CDC is perfectly fine in its pronouncements.
As I have noted before, liberals cannot learn from experience. This seems to be the central facet of PostModern Liberalism.
A subtle, but very strong secondary marking characteristic is a failure to deal with, perhaps even recognize, internal inconsistencies — that is, they can handle two mutually exclusive propositions and SWEAR up and down that they are both true, at different times. Whichever happens to be “convenient” at the moment to whatever stance they wish to support is UTTERLY TRUE in their minds. It does not matter if the two things are mutually exclusive.
Which is why they can personally see how wretched government is — “Governments suck!!” — and still believe thoroughly in “Mo’ Mo’ MO’ GOVERNMENT!!”.
It’s how they can argue for defunding police (which hurts black people BY FAR worse than anyone else) and still say they support black people (and why they can also burn down black homes and businesses, but still be “pro blacks”). And similarly — “Burning cars would be violent, yes. But no, THOSE burning cars are NOT a sign of violence.”
Once you start looking for them, these inconsistencies in their positions are beyond Legion, and truly “SMH”.
OBloodyHell,
One of the best memes ever was from the Occupy Wall Street days when some female protester is getting pepper sprayed by police and above her it says ‘wants more government’ and above the police it says ‘more government’.
I Callahan—When they said it was OK to protest in the streets because racism is also a “public health issue” was what put them in the Joe Biden category of credibility for me. “C’mon, Man!”
And yet people buy it. Over and over and over again.
@OBloodyHell:
Spot on regarding the Prog inability to process Inconsistencies. This is hugely ironic given the erstwhile Hegelian/Marxist obsession with Contradictions.
I think, too, that the Prog Elite also has very poor form in the Systems Thinking Department, but that’s for another day.
re: “social engineering” and ” my watershed moment was when they more or less said it was OK to protest last summer. I knew then it was all BS.”
Plus when they took on gun ownership and racism as medical problems that were in their purview.
C’mon guys, we’ll NEVER trust you ever again.
I’m hearing some great stories in blog comments about people not wearing masks and feeling energized with renewed freedom. And also stories of political liberals expressing doubt about CDC and doubling down on mask wearing … out of doors … while walking all alone.
Of course, it came out today that almost half of the staff at the CDC are not vaccinated. Another feather in the cap of bureaucratic credibility.
A sane, rational approach was floated back in the halcyon days of May 2020 that perhaps we should simply focus on protecting the vulnerable rather than rely on untested hypotheses about masks and lockdowns. Then the CDC promulgated the near absolutely lethal advice to the symptomatic to wait until you had breathing trouble before going to the hospital. I haven’t checked recently, but that was on their website until late last year at least.
By the summer, plenty of qualified medical professionals were reporting that early and relatively simple medical intervention was the key to survival. And then TPTB and Big Tech (BIRM) decided such rational, sane medical advice was misinformation and memory holed it. That was right about the time the NEJM and The Lancet were publishing the Surgisphere debacle. But these people’s attraction to science is apparently more sexual than intellectual.
We knew two things from the beginning: 1) Who was most vulnerable, and 2) What early treatments were proving effective. TPTB ignored that in favor of exercising raw power. And tens of thousands – if not hundreds of thousands – died needlessly.
Should the rational and sane somehow regain control in the indeterminable future, this will be viewed as one of the greatest crimes against humanity since the Holocaust.
Someone else who has had his illusions punctured. (/sarc jftr)
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/393831.php
“NeverTrumpers, Cultural Liberals (But I Repeat Myself) Vow: You Can Have Our Masks When You Pry Them From Our Cold, Dead Faces!”
AND
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/393826.php
My biggest problem with the vaccine (I had my second jab a couple of weeks ago) is that it has ruined my perfect excuse for being a misanthropic recluse.
Over at marginalrevolution blog, MrRoboto made the definitive Covid19 year saga comment about the CDC and FDAs politicisation: last August they knew the vaccines were working from early clinical test data.
Yet these fake, corrupt institutions kept everyone in the dark, killing 10,000 of Americans needlessly.
They could have announced that these were coming by December and tell states to prepare to distribute them by the 10s of millions.
They knew but didn’t. Why? Why were tens of thousands, maybe a hundred thousands not saved by such local health department preparedness? When it’s the CDCs essential job?
GET TRUMP OUT OF THE WHITE HOUSE! Political messaging mattered much more to these evil tax payer dungeons of Hell than than, perhaps, enable Trump’s re-election. Ergo, no pre-election greatness for out great President was permitted to shine in him before Election Day.
In getting a Trump Vaccination myself. He’s The a people’s hero to Americans.
Neo, you’re behind the curve in Evil Detection, here. Far behind. Unaccountable evil and wildly over compensated.
Geoffrey Britain is absolutely correct to condemn the CDC: “They’re also complicit in mass murder.”
Everyone thought I’d could not be done, but through OWS is was done.
And Trump led it.
PS They j ew from the trials of the vaccines in the forefront. The pre-ordered ines like Pfizer and Moderna. Only in August did the Europeans start ordering vaccines. The French/Swiss Sandoz? Sanifil? one turned out to be a dud, though.
They let industry over promise and they failed to spread their commitments around, unlike Trump and the newly freed from the EU, Great Britain. They badly managed matters and continue to persecute industry instead of treating modern science as their wondered friends in promoting national well-being and health care.
Regarding the earlier comments about many CDC employees not having had the vaccine. I would take that as a sign that many of the rank and file disagree with their own leadership. It is part of an ongoing pattern . You can see evidences of this in city governments, where the people at the top are at odds with other city employees such as the police, things that are happening in the military and probably what is going on in federal law enforcement such as the FBI.
Since I’ve had Covid why, exactly, do I need the vaccine? There doesn’t seem to be any guidelines one way or another in this regard. I’m sure there are tens of millions of us. Are we immune? And if we are to what degree? Why can’t I and others that have had Covid get about our lives like those who have received the vaccine?
Rob Stephenson:
Because they don’t know how long your immunity will last, and so the idea is that the shot will help and act as a sort of booster. It is similar to what they tell me, as a person who has already had shingles, about getting the shingles shot. They recommend getting it anyway even though it is exceedingly rare to have shingles twice. Of course, in the case of shingles, it’s not contagious so the decision to have or not have the shot affects only the health of the person making the decision.
I think they also recommend COVID shots for those who have had it because some people who say they’ve had it didn’t really have it, they just had something with similar symptoms around the same time but were never tested.
And of course I don’t think they really want any of us to go back to normal life. So that would include those who have had COVID and are fine now.
One thing I think it would be important to know is the age of the vaccine refuseniks at the CDC. Are they mostly young, like under 30 or under 40? If so, then they may have weighed the pros and cons for a person their age and have decided the risks of COVID for them are very small. Of course, refusing to have the shot doesn’t help speed up the herd immunity thing.
“One thing I think it would be important to know is the age of the vaccine refuseniks at the CDC. Are they mostly young, like under 30 or under 40? If so, then they may have weighed the pros and cons for a person their age and have decided the risks of COVID for them are very small. Of course, refusing to have the shot doesn’t help speed up the herd immunity thing.” – Neo
AesopSpouse made the same observation to me not long before I checked in on the thread here and saw Neo’s comment. Great minds etc etc.
If we had reporters instead of Journalists, someone might have asked Fauci that question.
IIRC, many military folk are holding off precisely because they are in that demographic, which is much less likely to either get the virus or suffer seriously if they do, plus they are much more physically fit than the desk warriors which reduces their danger even more.
It’s a rational risk assessment.
I don’t think herd immunity factors in significantly if the crowd not vaccinated is highly likely to be either uninfected or asymptomatic, which means less likely to transmit. Same as with the theater of vaccinating children under 12. They should only get the shots when older.
We can watch and see how many CDC staffers get sick, I suppose.
Statistics still work if you input the right numbers.
One picture is worth a thousand guffaws – Fauci and the infinite mask trick.
https://www.americanthinker.com/images/bucket/2021-05/229469_5_.jpg
The CDC is co-located with the Emory University campus, a bastion of liberal indoctrination in Atlanta. The surrounding community is home to thousands of CDC employees and beneficiaries and represents the typical liberal environment found in northeastern university towns. One can walk almost any lily-white residential street within several miles and find multiple 2-year old Stacey Abrams “Won” signs and Black Lives Matter posters in windows and yards. Folks will cross the street to avoid an unmasked walker. And you actually see double-masking! “Coexist” is a big theme. Is it any wonder that these same people weaponized the CDC to make sure President Trump was not re-elected? They’re no different than the editorial board at the WaPo or the tyrants of Facebook.