Maybe not humanity, but trust in institutions has been badly fractured recently. Relevant to this story, the CDC in particular is no longer trusted by roughly half the country.
Which half is that? The half that continued to wear masks after the CDC said it wasn't necessary? Or the half the refuses to wear masks when the CDC says it is necessary?
Neither side are actually listening to the CDC, both sides just do whatever they want, and attempt to justify it by pointing to the CDC.
The half that is oddly combative over basic attempts to reduce risk of transmission of a disease that has now killed nearly 5 million people worldwide, 750,000 of whom lived in the USA, a nation that for many decades, until quite recently, people worldwide looked to for leadership in the fight against global infectious diseases.
I’m really starting to question just how much of the rest of the world actually looks towards the United States for leadership. I think most countries leadership just does whatever they think is best for their own countries and it’s always been like that.
I think the whole “look towards America” thing is some comforting line Americans tell ourselves because we like to think we’re superior. And you can always invoke the actions of the administration you don’t like to claim we’ve lost that special status / respect.
Edit: I’m talking about the whole “Leader of the free world” schtick. Not so much industry standards and funding.
Having been a medical student in NZ attached to an infectious diseases team, the idea that NZ research (or even our ideas of best practice) are not heavily dependent on R&D and standards institutes from the USA isn't plausible. I find it likely that Australia is in a similar position.
We are lucky in that NZ and Australia have sufficient political will to create and maintain socialized healthcare systems independent of the approach the US has taken. The shortfall in global leadership during this pandemic is, in part, from philosophical differences over whether -and, to what extent- it is a duty of "the state" to respond to phenomena like pandemics that tend to kill a large amount of people without a state-level response.
I think you should travel abroad a bit more. There is a love/hate relationship in some countries, but we really do set the tone widely, and steer things. It’s a combination of official stick and carrot, and our enormous soft power apparatus.
> a nation that for many decades, until quite recently, people worldwide looked to for leadership in the fight against global infectious diseases.
We hear similar stories in the UK about "our leadership role in the world" but actually travel the world a bit (or perhaps listen to the news in a foreign language for a while) and you'll soon realise that it isn't the case. It's just a story to make people feel good, or shame, whichever is necessary for those telling it.
> The half that continued to wear masks after the CDC said it wasn't necessary?
If you posed the question I presume the CDC would say that it's not necessary to wear hats. I don't think it's a reasonable conclusion to then say that everyone wearing hats distrusts the CDC.
Even if we accept that wearing a mask is equivalent to wearing a hat - it's not at all - but still, even if we were to, if the CDC initially said you should wear a hat and later said that you shouldn't wear a hat, and if no member of the public was wearing hats prior to these pronouncements, what else would continued hat wearing imply?
This Atlantic article[1] seems to imply that it would be "an expression of political identity". These Pew Research results[2] titled Partisan Differences Over the Pandemic Response Are Growing would seem to back that up. It's not the only research they've done of this nature[3].
That's splitting hairs, no one was wearing masks before their guidance came in. For them to say you shouldn't wear masks or you don't need to has exactly the same meaning given their previous stance.
Maybe we should now quibble about my use of "no one"?
No it's not. The minute I start doing something, whether I continue to do it or not is a complex decision that comes down to many more factors other than why I started doing it.
The most common stated reason amongst my peers for not stopping mask usage during the short summer detente we had locally was a desire to get their moneys worth from all the masks they had already bought.
> The most common stated reason amongst my peers for not stopping mask usage during the short summer detente we had locally was a desire to get their moneys worth from all the masks they had already bought.
As that’s fallacious on its face, I’d have to assume that wasn’t the actual reason. Regardless, it’s still a quibble given we’re talking about actual guidance, if there’s a point to arguing about s hypothetical set of guidelines that will never be issued and would provide a distinction if they were , I might be interested. It wasn’t, won’t, and wouldn’t.
The CDC recommends masks. This is the scientific consensus. If you google back in the past you see consistency in their policies with respect to all communicable respiratory diseases. Measles, H1N1 etc.. It's all there in Google.
For the current pandemic, they did not initially recommend masking because they could not justify it for the general population over the medical community. They wanted to avoid a tragedy of the commons of PPE. The covid19 prevalence was low so the appropriate path was to protect those most likely to be exposed rather than enact a universal blanket. Any blanket has holes regardless of how fine the weave is and the doctors/nurses/hospitals are the choke points. And they are ultimately the carers who save lives.
So this nonsense of the CDC said this and that is just that: nonsense.
> For the current pandemic, they did not initially recommend masking because they could not justify it for the general population over the medical community. They wanted to avoid a tragedy of the commons of PPE.
Then here's what they should have said: "Masks work, but health care workers need to be prioritized. So we have asked the President to exercise the government's eminent domain power to ensure that adequate supplies of PPE are available to health care workers. That may impact availability of masks for the general public in the near term, until supply chains can respond to the large increase in demand."
What they actually said was: "Masks don't work so don't bother trying to buy them."
The problem though was the question, and the mismatch between how the scientific community and the layman communicate
When asked do masks stop the spread of covid, the answer is and has always been no. No mask 100% stops the spread. If you share that information with the common person, it quickly becomes a facebook post about how masks are totally useless.
No amount of ifs and buts will convince the common man if they don't want to be convinced. I've seen people even on hacker news adamantly treating Fauci's initial prediction that it would be no more dangerous than the flu as gospel, despite a 16 months of more up-to-date information
I see that common misunderstanding that Kary Ellis said that PCR tests can't detect viruses, when he actually said PCR tests can't me used to measure viral loads on every single damn post about PCR tests. It's been debunked so much but people do not want to listen
> When asked do masks stop the spread of covid, the answer is and has always been no.
No, the answer is to reject the question, and to redirect it instead to the proper scientific question, which is what fraction of incoming germs a mask will stop. That fraction is practically indistinguishable from 100% for an N95 mask properly sealed, is in the mid to high 90s for medical grade masks or masks of multiple layers of cloth properly sealed, and drops off sharply as the weave of the cloth loosens or the quality of the seal decreases.
The problem is that so-called "scientists" refuse to do this. They make authoritative pronouncements instead, which of course are often wrong. Saying "no" to the question "do masks stop the spread of COVID" is just as wrong as saying "yes". But so-called "scientists" are too lazy or too caught up in their own sense of authority to properly reframe the question. So if the public then distrusts them because they make false authoritative pronouncements, they have nobody to blame but themselves.
> No amount of ifs and buts will convince the common man if they don't want to be convinced.
Most people are not extremists or crackpots. They are quite capable of understanding a response such as I gave above. And they are also quite capable of seeing when a person is not being forthright with them because that person is more concerned with maintaining their position as an authority then with telling the truth and being honest about what we actually do and do not know. So even if some of the things so-called "scientists" say are actually true, the public is right to not believe them, because once someone has shown that they will prevaricate with you, you cannot afford to take anything they say at face value. And that is precisely the position that our current public health authorities, not to mention scientists in many other fields, have gotten themselves into. As I said above, they have nobody to blame but themselves.
Back in January 2020 they were saying n95 masks are primarily for health care workers. They didn't say they don't work. There are news articles from then that literally talk about the statements you are claiming they should have said.
"Most people don’t know how to use face masks correctly, and a rush to buy masks could prevent the people who need them most — health care providers — from getting them."
The Surgeon General under Trump did make a statment: " U.S. surgeon general recently urged the public to “STOP BUYING MASKS!” “They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!,” wrote Surgeon General Jerome Adams on Twitter"
So maybe you are confusing that statement? Regardless, the messaging was obviously not clear, but I can't find anything confirming the CDC said "masks don't work so don't bother trying to buy them."
> There are news articles from then that literally talk about the statements you are claiming they should have said.
"Most people don't know how to use face masks correctly" is not what I claimed they should have said. That's basically saying "masks don't work unless you're a health care worker who has been trained to wear them properly". Which is wrong since plenty of people who aren't health care workers do know how to wear masks properly. It's not rocket science; you just have to make sure there's a proper seal. Most N95 mask packages give explicit directions about how to do that.
> "a rush to buy masks could prevent the people who need them most — health care providers — from getting them."
Which, again, is not what I claimed they should have said. The proper response to this valid concern, as I said, would have been to use the government's eminent domain power to ensure that PPE was prioritized to health care workers (or, in the case of the CDC, NIH, etc. who don't have that authority themselves, to recommend to the President to do that). Not to prevaricate about people not knowing how to wear masks properly.
Dr. Fauci went on TV to tell people that there is no reason to wear a mask. He’s strictly NIAID but considering NIAID is in the CDC and that’s under HHS that leaves us with the CDC silent between two guys telling us not to wear masks.
There's arguments over whether the CDC was politicized under Trump [1]. It's possible this was career bureaucracy failures of course and the Biden administration is just trying to whitewash that failure by blaming the previous administration. For me however, the fact that right wing politicians appear to consistently exert pressure on scientific agencies [2] to toe the party line gives me a prior that scientific agencies under right wing governments are less trustworthy because they are subject to undue influence.
[2] This is based on my observations of Canada and the USA where "politically sensitive" topics like global warming, reproductive rights, & gun rights (in the USA) are decidedly marked by publication and public speaking bans on the parts of scientists. These kinds of actions generally do not appear to be present under left-leaning administrations which seem to tolerate dissenting opinions and politically inconvenient statements/papers better. This does not necessarily imply a similar action for something like the CDC/pandemic, but I worry there may be unofficial indirect signalling effects from scientists observing what happens if you cross the current political power base.
> It's possible this was career bureaucracy failures
The mindset of public health officials where they are willing to prevaricate with the public because of some claimed concern like "there won't be enough PPE for health care workers", instead of just recommending to the President to use the authority the government already has to address such concerns, goes back decades, so it cannot be blamed on any particular administration or political party. I think it's just part of a general tendency on the part of all governments to become less efficient and more protective of their power over time.
> left-leaning administrations which seem to tolerate dissenting opinions and politically inconvenient statements/papers better
I don't know where you're getting that from. Both parties in the US consistently politicize science. The only reason it seems to be more prevalent when Republicans are in office is that the US media reports on the two parties very differently, so there's a huge selection bias in what is made visible to the average person.
I don't think this is a "both sides" issue or biased media coverage (& note I specifically said Canada and USA because I am making observations about both countries and they have extremely different media profiles).
I'm not talking about general low-level politicization (although I still think the right generally wins here). I'm talking about expressly restricting the kinds of topics scientists are allowed to speak about with media, the conclusions of the research being altered by political appointees, etc. Please feel free to present counter examples.
The Canadian right wing was specifically trying to help the Albertan government which is heavily dependent on oil (but in general the right seems to hogtie themselves to the oil and gas industry generally).
That it absolved NASA leadership and the administration itself is questionable (kind of a "we investigated ourselves and found that we didn't do anything wrong" kind of thing). The oversight powers of IGs in the US are laughable so I generally trust their conclusions less (right or left). If you fill the public affairs office full of your lackeys and let them run amok, then you can claim ignorance and the investigator can't really conclude you directly directed any action.
> I'm talking about expressly restricting the kinds of topics scientists are allowed to speak about with media, the conclusions of the research being altered by political appointees, etc.
I don't think the right is any worse than the left in this respect either. Looking at a small number of examples is not a good approach. This has been going on for decades, as I said, and it affects pretty much everything that we all think we know outside of perhaps hard science like physics or astronomy and mathematics.
For one thing, every single one of the references you give is a partisan source; none of them are from neutral observers. Arguably there aren't any neutral observers, at least none that have a media channel through which to publish. So it's basically impossible to actually get an unbiased view from anyone. The only way to really form your own opinion would be to dig down to the original primary sources and evaluate the actions and decisions they describe on the merits, based on the information the actual people involved had at the time--which in many cases won't even be available to the public for decades, so it's useless as far as trying to decide about contemporary issues. But by doing such historical studies on the handling of past issues, one can at least uncover general patterns of how governments, media organizations, and other large bureaucracies and oligarchies handle such things, which can be useful in fueling a healthy skepticism about whatever they are saying about contemporary issues. Any such healthy skepticism will be equally directed at both left and right.
> There's arguments over whether the CDC was politicized under Trump
As far as I can tell, Trump had little if anything to do with public pronouncements by health officials about mask wearing. He did tend to discount mask effectiveness in his tweets and random public statements, but I think it's pretty well established that no government health officials gave any weight to his statements about that, or about anything else for that matter.
I would agree that the Federal government's failure to take obvious steps like using eminent domain power to ensure adequate supplies of PPE to health care workers was Trump's failure while he was President, since the President is the one who has the final say on the Federal government's eminent domain power.
Both Fauci and Birx have stated that they had to moderate their language while speaking under Trump because they didn't want to anger him or be banished from giving information to the public.
> For the current pandemic, they did not initially recommend masking because they could not justify it for the general population over the medical community. They wanted to avoid a tragedy of the commons of PPE. The covid19 prevalence was low...
I posted links in this thread which discuss how the CDC was negligent in studying the possibility of asymptomatic spread early in the pandemic, and knowingly released test kits that were faulty.
What this means is that the CDC didn't actually know what the prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 was in the US in the early days of the pandemic. It was flying totally blind and as we eventually learned, the virus was silently spreading and establishing a foothold throughout parts of the country while the CDC was assuring Americans it had everything under control and the threat was low.
My family and friends in the US were able to stock up on medical masks and N95s in January before they were pulled from the shelves because I was living in Taiwan, where it was abundantly clear in January that there was a very serious respiratory pathogen on the loose.
> Yet Reuters has found new evidence that the CDC’s response to the pandemic also was marred by actions - or inaction - by the agency’s career scientists and frontline staff.
> In addition to learning of the early warning, reviewers determined the Respiratory Viruses Diagnostic Laboratory, run by a highly regarded scientist named Stephen Lindstrom, was beset with problems, including "process failures, a lack of appropriate recognized laboratory quality standards, and organizational problems related to the support and management of a laboratory supporting an outbreak response," the review said.
I know it's in vogue in America to blame everything on the current administration (this happens on both/all sides of the aisle) but in reality, institutional rot is responsible for a lot more of the shortcomings in institutional failures. There is an obvious decline that has been taking place in many agencies for decades, across both Democratic and Republican administrations.
I would assume it's for outside, as the CDC has changed its guidance on outdoor use, as we can see from this earlier, archived, guidance page[1]; this later guidance[2] which is more relaxed; and in particular this order[3]:
> The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued an Order pdf icon[PDF – 11 pages] on January 29, 2021 requiring the wearing of masks by people on public transportation conveyances or on the premises of transportation hubs to prevent spread of the virus that causes COVID-19. This Order was effective as of 11:59 p.m. February 1, 2021 and was published in the Federal Registerexternal icon on February 3, 2021. CDC will be amending this Order as soon as practicable, to not require that people wear masks while outdoors on conveyances or while outdoors on the premises of transportation hubs.
> Yet Reuters has found new evidence that the CDC’s response to the pandemic also was marred by actions - or inaction - by the agency’s career scientists and frontline staff.
> At a crucial moment in the pandemic when Americans were quarantined after possible exposure to the virus abroad, the agency declined or resisted potentially valuable opportunities to study whether the disease could be spread by those without symptoms, according to previously undisclosed internal emails, other documents and interviews with key players.
The headline says it all: CDC Report: Officials Knew Coronavirus Test Was Flawed But Released It Anyway
> In addition to learning of the early warning, reviewers determined the Respiratory Viruses Diagnostic Laboratory, run by a highly regarded scientist named Stephen Lindstrom, was beset with problems, including "process failures, a lack of appropriate recognized laboratory quality standards, and organizational problems related to the support and management of a laboratory supporting an outbreak response," the review said.
> The CDC declined to make Lindstrom or anyone else available for an interview and declined to discuss the unreleased internal review. A spokesman would only say that the agency had "acknowledged and corrected mistakes along the way."
Is it unreasonable for people to have lost faith and trust in the CDC based on its many pandemic failures?
The CDC is not perfect, no agency in any country is.
The thing is, we were hit by a pandemic that was practically impossible to stop. Some countries did better than others for a variety of reasons but it was bad times for everyone. And when times are bad, we look for people to blame. The virus is terrible, the agencies tasked with dealing with it did what they could, and that they couldn't solve an impossible problem in a superhuman way doesn't mean that they are unable to solve the easier problem of tracing back an infection.
Certainly, it was inevitable that the pandemic would hit the US. But after reading the articles I linked to, I think it's hard to argue reasonably that the CDC wasn't at a minimum incompetent if not negligent in its handling of the situation, especially early on.
The US literally imported the virus via evacuation flights, and then the CDC made the decision not to consider asymptomatic infection and spread. Not only would this have significantly reduced the risk of people from those evacuations potentially seeding the country with virus, it would have allowed the CDC to issue accurate preventative guidance to Americans.
Then the CDC pushed out test kits that it knew were faulty. I mean, come on! Is this the best America could have done?
Meanwhile, I was living in a country (Taiwan) that knew something was up in January. At the very beginning of the month, health officials started screening passengers with a travel history to Wuhan. There was a lot talk about what was happening, so people here started masking voluntarily and the government officially banned the export of surgical and N95 masks on January 24 to ensure adequate supply for the country. My family and friends in the US had medical masks and N95s because I told them to stock up in January.
Meanwhile in America, Fauci was telling Americans "there’s no reason to be walking around with a mask" and the Surgeon General was actually telling Americans masks might increase their risk of contracting the virus...in early March!
Yes, I'm aware that Taiwan is an outlier in its success against COVID due to a variety of factors, some intrinsic (like island geography). But the US response was an abject, embarrassing disaster and it wasn't just because of destiny or crazy politicians.
Don't forget the CCP lock down of local Wuhan travel with the exception of international flights. IIRC, early indicators of a possible outbreak existed long before the mass media picked up on the frenzy.
My parents who live in Taiwan were talking about it just as they were coming home from visiting me in the states around November 2019 and they were so concerned that they advanced me a box of medical grade masks by mid January, due to having lived through the hysteria with SARS-COV-1 in 2003.
No one took COVID19 seriously here while I commuted for work in NYC via MTA. At most, bottles of hand sanitizers did start appearing in the office late January but no one wore masks until the announcement for the "15 days to slow the spread" campaign.
In Alberta, nestled deep within the bowels of our provincial health care system, we had this guy whose job was to procure medical equipment in anticipation of any potential medical crisis. He saw the same news item I did about the Wuhan lockdown back in December 2019, and decided it would be a good time to procure extra PPE, just in case the then mysterious flu turned into a big deal.
What hero! In the early days Alberta was donating desperately needed PPE to the other provinces, because of that one guy and his unilateral decision. Every other professional with the agency to act blew it.
I was wandering around for months having accepted that a global pandemic was a forgone conclusion before our Government finally took action in Mid March of 2020.
The whole time I was wondering "Am I the crazy one?".
I was not the crazy one. Everybody else was the crazy one.
The thing is that the people at agencies like the CDC are literally paid to know.
The CDC has a Center for Preparedness and Response[1] dedicated to "advancing the nation’s preparedness and response for public health emergencies and threats", which receives over a billion dollars annually, hosts an Epidemic Intelligence Service conference every year, etc.
How can one reconcile the amount of money and resources allocated to the CDC programs that were supposed to help protect the US from pandemic threats with the embarrassingly inept response?
I flew from Taiwan to Singapore in late February 2020 and literally everyone on the plane (passengers and flight crew) were wearing masks even though IIRC masks were not required at the time. By then, it had been patently obvious to laypeople in Asia for weeks that this thing was spreading via the air. And yet you had America's top health officials telling people in early March they didn't need to worry about masking.
It can also be a culturally-adopted thing. From the 90's til now, wearing a mask was normalized to be necessary while navigating through cities like Taipei with dense smog and particulate matter. There's a reason why it's some times referred to as the moped capital of the world.
I guess when word got out that there was a potential spread of infection, Asians had no problem adapting mask wearing on other forms of mass transportation as well.
It really does have to be restored. This story sounds straight out of a CSI episode. But when you deal with the “real” police, you’re in for a world of disappointment.
I imagine almost no one remembers, but that show existed. After CSI exploded in 2000 everyone wanted to hit it big with forensics. That’s how we gif thinks like Bones and Crossing Jordan.
In 2004 we got me season three f Medical Investigation. It was about a team from the NIH that went around trying to solve disease outbreaks. It was a nice change from everything else being crime focused.
