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The public health profession has lost so much credibility over the last year. No one should feel the need to reverse engineer latent preemptive anticipatory inv

by krrrh 5y ago

The public health profession has lost so much credibility over the last year. No one should feel the need to reverse engineer latent preemptive anticipatory inverted Stockholm syndrome like this, but here we are.

seoaeu 5y ago
They've lost credibility because of a concerted effort to discredit them. An effort that was initiated specifically by people who didn't want to follow their broadly reasonable medical advice.
- krrrh 5y ago
  This is a conspiracy theory. An alternative observation is that some very credible critics see failure andrer failure and report on it. Here’s an article in today’s New York Times just to pluck one of dozens of data points out of the air. To the extent that the amateur game theory, vulgar p-fishing, and playing of telephone that is public health qualifies as a science, it is the most dismal. Rather than communicate the truth about unknowns, or maybe even be curious about the data that they were basing the guidance to mask outdoors on, the CDC scores another own-goal by seemingly misreporting the threat of ourdoor transmission by 3 orders of magnitude. > Saying that less than 10 percent of Covid transmission occurs outdoors is akin to saying that sharks attack fewer than 20,000 swimmers a year. (The actual worldwide number is around 150.) It’s both true and deceiving. … > In one study, 95 of 10,926 worldwide instances of transmission are classified as outdoors; all 95 are from Singapore construction sites. In another study, four of 103 instances are classified as outdoors; again, all four are from Singapore construction sites. > This obviously doesn’t make much sense. It instead appears to be a misunderstanding that resembles the childhood game of telephone, in which a message gets garbled as it passes from one person to the next. > The Singapore data originally comes from a government database there. That database does not categorize the construction-site cases as outdoor transmission, Yap Wei Qiang, a spokesman for the Ministry of Health, told my colleague Shashank Bengali. “We didn’t classify it according to outdoors or indoors,” Yap said. “It could have been workplace transmission where it happens outdoors at the site, or it could also have happened indoors within the construction site.” This sort of institutional negligence makes the Challenger o-ring disaster look like a paragon of careful professional judgement. Intelligent reporters with an ounce of capacity for independent thought like Zeynep Tufecki are able to get up to speed on the subject and single-handedly provide better guidance than the entire CDC. An institution that can put out false information and bad guidance with all the attendant psychological, political, and economic costs, where no one lifts their hand to argue against the group think is broken at a deep level. If I sound frustrated it’s because we do need a credible source of information and the CDC should provide that. Every time they do stuff like this they lose more institutional credibility. Instead we get more conspiracy theories in every direction. Even worse state and local governments make policy based on CDC guidance that mis-measures risk and results in worse spread of the virus. See for instance California’s sudden decision to halt outdoor dining which many have argued caused people to substitute a low risk activity for a higher risk activity (meeting anyway, but indoors at someone’s house) potentially resulting in a surge of cases. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/11/briefing/outdoor-covid-transmission-cdc-number.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/11/briefing/outdoor-covid-tr...
- mssundaram 5y ago
  They did this themselves. Fauci, CDC and WHO constantly have gone back and forth between each other and themselves.
  - michaelmrose 5y ago
    Do you have any other examples other than saying very early that people needn't mask up and then reversing on that point?
    - symlinkk 5y ago
      * “We don’t need to ban travelers from China, that’s absurd and xenophobic!” * “2 weeks to slow the spread, then this will all be over”
      - michaelmrose 5y ago
        Nobody in the infectious medicine field actually said it will be over in 2 weeks and the travel ban proposal under trump was xenophobic theater because it made a point of banning only some travel after we had community spread and didn't even stop a lot of travel after that. It was the worst of both worlds.
      - javagram 5y ago
        > * “We don’t need to ban travelers from China, that’s absurd and xenophobic!” Fauci and the CDC were the ones who told Trump in January to ban travel, if you didn’t know. Fauci spoke in public in January 30, 2020 in favor of the ban. Trump claimed many months later the opposite but he is a known liar. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fauci-china-restrictions/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fauci-china-restrictions/ “ According to a March 2020 Wall Street Journal article, it was HHS health officials (including Fauci) who had to convince Trump to agree to the China travel ban, not the other way around:” > 2 weeks to slow the spread, then this will all be over” Unclear why you put this in quotes. This was the message from certain politicians like Trump, but it was never said by anyone who would typically be called an expert.
    - 5y ago
- Exmoor 5y ago
  There's been plenty of unforced errors on the part of the government agencies. Claiming that masks don't help because they didn't want average citizens to buy them all up and still saying you shouldn't wear a K/N95 mask come to mind. Also, the horrific early failures with broken tests and bans on testing anyone who hadn't been in a specific area of China until it was far too late. Heck, the CDC just this week finally admitted the virus was airborne, something that anyone paying attention knew literally a year ago just from looking at early contact tracing of how the virus spread.
  - melling 5y ago
    Beginning in early April 2020, everyone promoted the usage of masks. It’s unfortunate that we were worried about consumers buying all the medical masks but in March 2020, it was a legitimate concern
    - symlinkk 5y ago
      They’ve proven already that they’ll sacrifice the health of the masses for the greater good when they lied about masks. I don’t think it’s a stretch to consider that they may be doing the same with vaccines.
    - krrrh 5y ago
      It was a legitimate concern and a ruinous strategy. I believe that competent leadership could have rallied the public to the cause of reserving PPE for hospitals for a month. Even if you don't believe in the basic nobility of the common person, congress could easily have passed emergency confiscatory legislation to pull all PPE off consumer markets without public health officials knowingly misrepresenting the truth. Trust in institutions was already low at the start of this, and the sort of misdirection that a series of supposedly noble lies has evinced has taken it to a new low and left us where we are now.

by krrrh 5y ago

seoaeu 5y ago

They've lost credibility because of a concerted effort to discredit them. An effort that was initiated specifically by people who didn't want to follow their broadly reasonable medical advice.

krrrh 5y ago
This is a conspiracy theory. An alternative observation is that some very credible critics see failure andrer failure and report on it. Here’s an article in today’s New York Times just to pluck one of dozens of data points out of the air. To the extent that the amateur game theory, vulgar p-fishing, and playing of telephone that is public health qualifies as a science, it is the most dismal. Rather than communicate the truth about unknowns, or maybe even be curious about the data that they were basing the guidance to mask outdoors on, the CDC scores another own-goal by seemingly misreporting the threat of ourdoor transmission by 3 orders of magnitude. > Saying that less than 10 percent of Covid transmission occurs outdoors is akin to saying that sharks attack fewer than 20,000 swimmers a year. (The actual worldwide number is around 150.) It’s both true and deceiving. … > In one study, 95 of 10,926 worldwide instances of transmission are classified as outdoors; all 95 are from Singapore construction sites. In another study, four of 103 instances are classified as outdoors; again, all four are from Singapore construction sites. > This obviously doesn’t make much sense. It instead appears to be a misunderstanding that resembles the childhood game of telephone, in which a message gets garbled as it passes from one person to the next. > The Singapore data originally comes from a government database there. That database does not categorize the construction-site cases as outdoor transmission, Yap Wei Qiang, a spokesman for the Ministry of Health, told my colleague Shashank Bengali. “We didn’t classify it according to outdoors or indoors,” Yap said. “It could have been workplace transmission where it happens outdoors at the site, or it could also have happened indoors within the construction site.” This sort of institutional negligence makes the Challenger o-ring disaster look like a paragon of careful professional judgement. Intelligent reporters with an ounce of capacity for independent thought like Zeynep Tufecki are able to get up to speed on the subject and single-handedly provide better guidance than the entire CDC. An institution that can put out false information and bad guidance with all the attendant psychological, political, and economic costs, where no one lifts their hand to argue against the group think is broken at a deep level. If I sound frustrated it’s because we do need a credible source of information and the CDC should provide that. Every time they do stuff like this they lose more institutional credibility. Instead we get more conspiracy theories in every direction. Even worse state and local governments make policy based on CDC guidance that mis-measures risk and results in worse spread of the virus. See for instance California’s sudden decision to halt outdoor dining which many have argued caused people to substitute a low risk activity for a higher risk activity (meeting anyway, but indoors at someone’s house) potentially resulting in a surge of cases. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/11/briefing/outdoor-covid-transmission-cdc-number.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/11/briefing/outdoor-covid-tr...
mssundaram 5y ago
They did this themselves. Fauci, CDC and WHO constantly have gone back and forth between each other and themselves.
- michaelmrose 5y ago
  Do you have any other examples other than saying very early that people needn't mask up and then reversing on that point?
  - symlinkk 5y ago
    * “We don’t need to ban travelers from China, that’s absurd and xenophobic!” * “2 weeks to slow the spread, then this will all be over”
    - michaelmrose 5y ago
      Nobody in the infectious medicine field actually said it will be over in 2 weeks and the travel ban proposal under trump was xenophobic theater because it made a point of banning only some travel after we had community spread and didn't even stop a lot of travel after that. It was the worst of both worlds.
    - javagram 5y ago
      > * “We don’t need to ban travelers from China, that’s absurd and xenophobic!” Fauci and the CDC were the ones who told Trump in January to ban travel, if you didn’t know. Fauci spoke in public in January 30, 2020 in favor of the ban. Trump claimed many months later the opposite but he is a known liar. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fauci-china-restrictions/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fauci-china-restrictions/ “ According to a March 2020 Wall Street Journal article, it was HHS health officials (including Fauci) who had to convince Trump to agree to the China travel ban, not the other way around:” > 2 weeks to slow the spread, then this will all be over” Unclear why you put this in quotes. This was the message from certain politicians like Trump, but it was never said by anyone who would typically be called an expert.
  - 5y ago
Exmoor 5y ago
There's been plenty of unforced errors on the part of the government agencies. Claiming that masks don't help because they didn't want average citizens to buy them all up and still saying you shouldn't wear a K/N95 mask come to mind. Also, the horrific early failures with broken tests and bans on testing anyone who hadn't been in a specific area of China until it was far too late. Heck, the CDC just this week finally admitted the virus was airborne, something that anyone paying attention knew literally a year ago just from looking at early contact tracing of how the virus spread.
- melling 5y ago
  Beginning in early April 2020, everyone promoted the usage of masks. It’s unfortunate that we were worried about consumers buying all the medical masks but in March 2020, it was a legitimate concern
  - symlinkk 5y ago
    They’ve proven already that they’ll sacrifice the health of the masses for the greater good when they lied about masks. I don’t think it’s a stretch to consider that they may be doing the same with vaccines.
  - krrrh 5y ago
    It was a legitimate concern and a ruinous strategy. I believe that competent leadership could have rallied the public to the cause of reserving PPE for hospitals for a month. Even if you don't believe in the basic nobility of the common person, congress could easily have passed emergency confiscatory legislation to pull all PPE off consumer markets without public health officials knowingly misrepresenting the truth. Trust in institutions was already low at the start of this, and the sort of misdirection that a series of supposedly noble lies has evinced has taken it to a new low and left us where we are now.