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Comment by afavour | Hacker News Reader

In a way it's reassuring that people of all political stripes can at least come together on one point: that the CDC has been asleep at the wheel during most of this pandemic. Hopefully at some point there will be a discussion about how to reform the body to be much more proactive.

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The CDC is not so much asleep at the wheel, we just don't have any kind of coherent public health system in the USA. There's basically an independent public health officer for practically every county, and there's very little coordination between them and the CDC.

Michael Lewis' book "The Premonition" is eye-opening to how dysfunctional public health is in the US.

And it's not like he's alone, even the head of the CDC this week called for a reform of the public health system in the US (https://www.politico.com/news/2022/01/21/rochelle-walensky-c...). The only picture I'm getting is that the CDC doesn't really feel like they can do anything.

The CDC has never balanced risks in any reasonable way. If you listened to the CDC, you wouldn't eat sunny-side up eggs, medium-rare steak, and Prosciutto.

I'm not sure its limited to just the CDC. The entire medical field misapplied basic fluid dynamics for over 50 years and incorrectly concluded that covid couldn't be airborne.

Surely mistakes have been made (proving that they are human) and we should always be ready to reassess something as important as a pandemic response but this seems ungenerous. The multitude of factors that make up the disease and how our bodies respond, along with externalities, is hugely complex. Trying to come up with a single unified response that is understandable by most people makes it harder. Lastly, the political situation just exasperated everything.

Imagine trying to design a national Kubernetes process that everyone would install in their home. ;)

I have a mostly positive opinion on the CDC and I wonder if some of the problems are a result of political influence?

The WHO and their fight against the idea that COVID is airborne is even more confusing to me. It felt like they didn't even want the idea discussed.

What gives you a positive opinion of the CDC? By their own admission they have lied to the public multiple times.

That's not something that is indicative of good leadership, even if supposedly done for benevolent reasons.

A million times this.

Break it up and scatter it to the four winds. Being heavily taxed for the "privilege" of being lied to is anathema to democracy, even if all the cool politicians, media, fossil fuel and arms companies are doing it.

> What gives you a positive opinion of the CDC?

There are a lot of really great people working for the CDC and they are doing some excellent work. They also made some bad decisions around respect to COVID-19 that absolutely does affect their trustworthiness.

However, if I add up the positives and negatives, they still are come out with a net positive rating for me. There's a lot more to the CDC than their COVID response.

This is one of my main qualms with how public health does their work. Lying is justified if you think it will convince more people to do something that will improve metrics at a population level. Maybe that works for a period of time, but once people find out, it destroys their credibility.

>By their own admission they have lied to the public multiple times.

Supporting evidence please.

Good point I’m not sure they ever actually admitted to lying about masks.

"When science mixes with politics, what you mostly get is politics."

This is an amazing quotation and now I'm reading about John Barry, so thanks for posting it.

Heard it recently, did not know who to attribute it to.

"when you mix science and politics, you get politics" -- John Barry

When policies masquerade as science, is nothing but politics.

CDC is the agency that was running the "Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male" as recently as the 1970s.

I wish we could all come together and say, "this needs more study" too and admit we might not have enough data to actually make a real decision.

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