Better late than never, I suppose, but is anyone at the world’s foremost public health agency going to take responsibility for a terrible drawn-out two years of confused messaging and contradictory advice?
From the absolute beginning of the Covid-19 outbreak back in February of 2020, perhaps even months before, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) was already botching their pandemic response.
The first screw-up was not having properly functioning test kits, something that could have helped slow and identify infected individuals weeks and months before the Coronavirus took off on a cross-country trip.
Then there was the contradictory guidance on masks. Dr. Anthony Fauci first said masks were unnecessary, then changed his tune, then changed again.
Then the guidance became messy, like asking you to wear a mask when outdoors by yourself, or making children wear masks outdoors on a playground. Or wearing masks in your own home. You get the point. The result is that few followed any of the nonsense. Eventually, Fauci admitted his guidance changed sometimes based on what he thought the public could accept hearing.
Just this month, the CDC dropped its recommendation for “social distancing,” a move that was way past its time since there was very little scientific basis for the original belief that staying six feet away from someone kept you safe, but five feet was dangerous.
This week, CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky is offering somewhat of an apology and vowing changes at the agency to better respond to the, um, next pandemic:
The head of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has admitted that the agency fell short in its response to the coronavirus pandemic, and announced that shakeups in the agency were coming.
The Associated Press reports that a “reset” at the organization is coming. That’s the way Dr Rochelle Walensky, the director of the CDC, put it during a press conference on Wednesday.
Dr Walensky said that the decision to change the agency was made internally and not at the request of the White House.
“I feel like it’s my responsibility to lead this agency to a better place after a really challenging three years,” she told The Associated Press.
“It’s not lost on me that we fell short in many ways,” Dr Walensky said. “We had some pretty public mistakes, and so much of this effort was to hold up the mirror … to understand where and how we could do better.”
Part of the problem which Walensky didn’t even mention was the politicization of public health.
For example, when it was revealed that public school guidance was being crafted hand-in-hand with the country’s largest teachers’ union, it became clear that the CDC was now a political pawn, not a science-based arbiter of health advice.
The culprit at the time was whether students should continue being subject to wearing masks in the classroom. The unions wanted endless masking forever and ever despite the fact that teachers could be vaccinated and the student age range was not susceptible to Covid-19.
That dynamic played out many times throughout the Covid response of 2021 when parents were fighting schools to simply let children get back in the classroom. The CDC did more damage to kids in terms of their social development and overall education during Covid-19 than anything else combined in the past decade.
Basically, the CDC had one job, and Walensky admits they failed but isn’t admitting all the nuances of the failure:
“For 75 years, CDC and public health have been preparing for Covid-19, and in our big moment, our performance did not reliably meet expectations,” Walensky acknowledged in her statement.
The media endlessly accused the Trump administration of interfering in Covid guidance from the CDC and FDA though whatever was happening paled in comparison to the meddling the Biden administration did in 2021 with vaccine mandates.
This brings us to the Covid-19 vaccines themselves. From the very beginning, they were billed as not only a way to keep you out of the hospital but also to eliminate the spread of infection entirely. That point is being shot down the memory hole now but it was the prevalent view of many health bureaucrats and journalists who would excoriate the unvaccinated as a plague on society.
Turns out the Covid-19 vaccines do not stop the spread of the virus leaving the vaccinated population able to spread it just as well as the unvaccinated. Another example of CDC misguidance.
The examples of missteps, poor guidance, confusing advice, and contradictory information could go on another 10,000 words but what’s the point? Americans watched it unfold and become numb to the hyperbolic warnings once reality started to diverge from the things the CDC was saying.
As it stands today, some school districts will still be subjecting students to masks despite there being no requirement or recommendation to do so and despite the harm it inflicts.
Rooting out the bad Covid advice and bad habits will take time. Society still hasn’t fully recovered and there are children that have suffered years of learning loss and may never fully recover to the point they were at pre-Covid.
Heads should have rolled at the CDC a long time ago. Instead, it’ll be a “regrouping” of sorts and the addition of things like an “Equity Office” to inject more politics into public health:
The agency will start a new equity office which aims to increase diversity both in the CDC’s workforce and add that lens to its public health activities.
Government bureaucracies typically respond to failure by adding more layers of bureaucracy. That’s what the CDC is doing with these so-called “big changes.”
With that said, expect the next pandemic to be messier, more confusing, and managed worse than this one.
Oh, wait, the next pandemic is already being screwed up.
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