I take that to mean the opposite of the quote you gave. So it's unclear which is true.
This is ridiculous. Even with the above, they are “unsure” if it was related to anything else like “fatigue”. Like come on.
Talk to people all day about symptoms they're experiencing and you can develop psychosomatic effects. Especially if you're over-worked and that kind of censusing isn't your day-to-day.
Not to say nothing happened to them. Just that medical causality is really complicated.
Don't you remember what happened to 9/11 workers who then died of specific forms of cancer? The US government fully knew that working there was dangerous for their health due to the toxic dust.
What executive working at the CDC now will still be there in 15 years? That won't be their problem...
Vinyl chloride exposure risk, in contrast, is pretty well understood; we've been working with it for over 100 years (and crashing trainloads of it for about that long).
I agree the EPA (not CDC) made errors after 9/11, but they were working with a novel threat.
You underplay this, however unwittingly. (Sorry for the long post here.)
I lived in New York suburbs and had a firefighter friend who by his commanding officers was encouraged not to go down there (reasons unknown to me) despite being willing. I was glad for him (and his family) because the risk of spending days/weeks in that strange smelling smoke were pretty obvious.
Common sense isn’t “science” but the Bayesian priors for the risk given what we knew about asbestos, asbestos in office buildings, other chemicals in plastics in office buildings, the prolonged period people were working in the smoke, the lack of leadership demanding masks due to the discomfort/heat and the great strange stench of the smoke were all pretty obvious to anyone following the news in the area.
Amidst very reasonable questioning and concern for first responder heros spending large amounts of time in the smoke (and after it was clear there were no more survivors to be found), while smoke was still abundant, the EPA literally declared it was “safe” during public questioning about it and in very strong terms, when it was clear there could be no such scientific basis to conclude a statement as strong as that. I was shocked at the time and I hold their previously respectable but politically-oriented leader Christine Todd Whitman personally responsible for the lie and injury to 1000s of people so that the capitalist system could rebuild as fast as possible at the expense of first responder suckers who trusted the elite all the while praising them for their sacrifice. (I don’t usually view the world in such terms but in this particular circumstance I completely do.)
The way people clearing the site as fast as possible were lied to was unconscionable. I am sure Ms. Whitman was pressured from above her, but I consider it one of the most obvious blatant political economically-driven hypocritical lies to come out of my government, a complete self-betrayal of the EPA in fulfilling their core mission purpose and values, and a dark disgrace upon all involved.
Looking back, I don’t think I misremembered the EPA characterization of it as “safe”. They did declare it safe per Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Environmental_...
Per Wikipedia, Ms Whitman claims the agency statement of “safe” was never about ground zero, just lower manhattan, which I will concede may be true, but ground zero was a super obvious concern at the time amidst press questioning and even if I should be charitable and not claim it was a bald face lie, it was a lie by omission, misdirection, etc. The lack of clarity on the risks to ground workers or public concern or advocacy for them by the agency with the most expertise and pertinent mission was and is a betrayal. They couldn’t have added a qualifying statement of concern with whatever degree of uncertainty they had at the time about ground zero at the time? “There are risks/unknown here but not here?” I don’t mind also blaming local political officials also for using/misusing/twisting EPA words for their agendas and on behalf of are business owners small or large, or national security officials playing psychological or political games at the requests of their leadership, but I came away with the a stench of deception.
I try to tell myself “Deception? Couldn’t it have been just ordinary incompetence, a failure of leadership, scientific uncertainty?” But the silence about the risks to first responders and cleanup teams —all the while while the entire culture was voluminously heroizing them, to me, speaks volumes. This was a completely predictable tragedy which, while perhaps not completely avoidable, would have been much more morally defensible if the risks and unknowns would have been openly acknowledged and disclosed responsibly to the people who put their lives and health on the line to accelerate economic recovery so they could make an informed decision or requested at least hazard pay before taking the risks. But no. They were deceived and lied to. All while being praised for their sacrifice. Makes me sick.
No causality, nothing to report.
Multiple trains derailed in East Palistine. Netflix even filmed a documentary about it there.
Knowing all that, both parties sided with the railways and voted to force the rail workers back to work.
Post accident, audio recordings of a railway supervisor ordering safety inspectors to ignore safety issues were released.
Poisoning an entire town is not a good look for either the Democrats or the Republicans, so the CDC has every political incentive possible to downplay this incident, regardless of who wins the next election.
The CDC scientists in this case almost certainly came to the obvious conclusion and then properly documented and reported it.
After all, protecting these people was the justification the public health administration used to say "masks don't work".
You have to be a total sucker to believe they're optimizing for your subpopulation. They're the #1 Greater Good Team.
If admitting they got sick would reduce faith in the government and that would be bad For The Greater Good, they would just lie.
https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2021-07-27/timeline-cd...
March 24, 2020
Even as the coronavirus spreads across the United States — shutting down businesses, sporting events and schools — the CDC’s advice around masking remains unequivocal: Healthy people who do not work in the healthcare sector and are not taking care of an infected person at home do not need to wear masks.
Yes, the CDC said masks don't prevent the spread of the virus. They also said it mitigates the spread of the virus, which are both true statements when the number of people wearing masks grows to "most of the country."
Medicine is a statistical science, which a lot of people have a hard time wrapping their heads around the nuances of.
Hardly makes a difference though. CDC advice in March 2020 was that the vast majority don't need to wear one. Then suddenly everyone had to wear one, on pain of fines. Nothing about masks or the virus or "the science" changed. The reliability problem remains.
Are you sure? Because I'm pretty sure they refined the transmission model after understanding the virus better, looked at the cost / benefit ratios on mitigation options, and concluded that masks were better than nothing given that quarantining everyone wasn't an option.
In that sense, "the science changed" in that we understood the situation better. There is also, of course, the gap between policy and science; the science can say X is true, whether we do Y in response to X being true is a cost / benefit calculus, and that calculus was changing continuously as policymakers updated economic impact estimates and saw how people responded to different approaches.
Reality is, respiratory viruses and masks have been around a long time. There was very little that was novel about SARS-CoV-2 despite attempts to claim otherwise, and prior understanding was correct: masks did nothing and that's clearly visible in the data. They were forced on everyone for political and ideological reasons, not scientific ones.
>> given that quarantining everyone wasn't an option.
It wasn't!? Because lockdowns sure seemed like quarantining everyone to the rest of us!
Frankly, one big reason why COVID was so bad in the US was because of how terribly the CDC fucked up testing.
They banned every test that wasn't their flawed one.
NPR did a good article on how massive the fuck up was - https://www.npr.org/2020/11/06/929078678/cdc-report-official...
The CDC also knowingly advised against masks, for months, claiming that they wouldn't help and could even hurt despite knowing better.
And that wasn't the only time they kept quiet with information that would have benefited Americans - this well sourced article points out a few of the more egregious incidents. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/07/31/cdcr-j31.html
Yes, I know, the irony!
My anecdotal experience, and I think it matches with lots of other people, is that I never caught covid for most of the pandemic while wearing an n95 and even travelled and was out in public quite a bit. It wasn't until after I and most other people stopped wearing a mask in public that I caught it. It could have been due to virus mutation or whatever, but I had quite a few close calls where I was around infected people but wearing a mask and did not catch it. I also have a large extended family, so lots of people caught it and there was always a homegrown investigation on where they got it. Every single time, there was always some maskless gathering a week or two before where multiple people became infected or a family member that brought it home.
Luckily the CDC has admitted it's mistake, though they haven't properly updated guidance accordingly.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwu...