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I personally follow the CDC guidelines. I think if everyone equally trusted CDC we wouldn't have the kind of outbreaks that we have seen in the past year. So ra

I personally follow the CDC guidelines. I think if everyone equally trusted CDC we wouldn't have the kind of outbreaks that we have seen in the past year. So raising doubts in CDC's credibility overall is hurtful IMO. That doesn't mean we shouldn't debate a particular recommendation and take it all as Gospel. Meaningful debate about a particular issue is useful. A general statement against credibility of CDC IMO is not. I maybe a minority here though, because I also to a large degree trust other American institutions. And that's coming from an immigrant who grew up in a country where the population is bombarded with anti-American conspiracy theories on a daily basis. The reason that I believe in American institutions is not because I take their words as Gospel. But because I believe for the most part trusting them leads to better results than the other way around.

andreilys 5y ago
The CDC/surgeon general recommended not wearing masks at the beginning of the pandemic, while Silicon Valley was way ahead of the curve (meanwhile hit pieces were posted by journalists with an axe to grind saying they we’re overreacting). So yes it has lost its credibility.
- dimator 5y ago
  This is the citation I found for this claim: https://www.snopes.com/news/2020/04/06/the-cdc-now-recommends-wearing-a-mask-in-some-cases/ https://www.snopes.com/news/2020/04/06/the-cdc-now-recommend... Overall, science is a process. If research came out that changed the recommendations, well, that's how science works. This is no different in my mind than the gradual change in the recommendations towards cigarette smoking over the decades, only in this case it played out over weeks and months (that article was from April of 2020). If you want something infallible and written in stone from day 1, that's what religious texts are for. But to claim that scientists lost credibility because new research led them to change their minds is to misunderstand the purpose of science.
  - Mountain_Skies 5y ago
    Masks weren't a mysterious new invention that the CDC just learned about at the start of the pandemic.
    - skocznymroczny 5y ago
      Also their usefulness is very limited outside of virtue signalling.
  - acituan 5y ago
    > science is a process. If research came out that changed the recommendations, well, that's how science works. CDC is a public health organization, not a science making organization. Its responsibility is to make the competent public health decisions based on the best available data and sound risk management. No one is faulting CDC for eventually course correcting, they are criticizing it for not having followed a more risk averse strategy from the get go and not having communicated their rationale honestly. Imagine if FDA behaved like CDC; roll out the vaccines to general public with minimal trial, updating their decision on safety as more data came in. Scientific incrementalism doesn't suit all use cases, and this has nothing to do with infallibility.
    - joshribakoff 5y ago
      > updating their decision on safety as more data came in. That’s literally what they do. They paused when there were concerns over blood clots, then expanded access to more cohorts as more studies were completed.
      - acituan 5y ago
        "with minimal trial" is the operative word, which didn't happen. The point being there is a balance between waiting for perfect data and making risk based policies.
  - bourgwaletariat 5y ago
    Do you actually remember this in real time? Do you remember at the beginning when everyone was wondering what to do and they said wear a mask and then they said not wear a mask and everyone around you was like, "What?? What is going on??" And then a short while later they said wear a mask again. These things have real world ramifications. You can't just point to a snopes a year later and retain the context within which this trust destroying episode went down. People have memories. They felt the frustration. They felt the betrayal. And they have yet to recover from that. To dismiss that very real feeling of betrayal as "well, this is what snopes says" is rewriting history. And, all of that comes on the heels of big tobacco, DDT, thalidomide, BPA, climate change, and then the new climate change, big pharma with their oxycontin and big medicine fleecing Americans and they won't even discuss medicare for all and we have to protect corporate profits over saving humanity?? Seriously?? And you dismiss all that with "science is a process." Except the process has been completely dismissed as well. Science created the process that takes years to approve a new vaccine, all of that has been completely dismissed exactly when a brand new technology for creating vaccines has been created. No part of this is science. This is politics. Period. 8 Months ago Kamala Harris herself said she would NOT get Trump's Vaccine. And so now it's somehow a different vaccine that we should all get? Now folks who don't want to get Biden's vaccine are science deniers? This. is. not. science. This is politics and a lot of people are refusing to get the vaccine purely because it's politics and NOT science. Did you watch Fauci get destroyed up there this week? He's a liar. Period.
- herbst 5y ago
  Our Swiss virus guy too told this 'lie' in the beginning, a few months later he explained that this was wrong and the only reason he said masks are not necessary was because there weren't enough and private people were already stockpiling it anyway. So people wore masks and life went on. I still don't understand why sooooo many countries can't be more honest about these things
  - paganel 5y ago
    > I still don't understand why so many countries can't be more honest about these things Depending on the jurisdiction and on your political opponents what the Swiss virus guy did is liable to send you to prison for intentionally lying and acting on that lie when employed as a public servant. Most probably the political debate is less vicious in Switzerland and that won't happen to your virus guy, but where I live (EU country from Eastern Europe) that would have been very dangerous for him to do in regards to his freedom. I guess that's why a lot of politicians double down on their lies, because if they're caught there's a small chance of them going to prison for them, so why take the risk?
    - herbst 5y ago
      Interesting point. Guess it comes down to his words as the initial wording was more like 'in the current situation it is not necessary to wear masks' not trump's vision of 'masks don't work' which would have been an obvious lie.
      - johnchristopher 5y ago
        In Belgium we had a third version: "masks are dangerous because people don't know how to adjust and wear them, they touch them too much (spreading the virus) and masks give a false sense of security that will lead to more contagions". The chief of our CDC equivalent said he was shopping in supermarket without mask. Then they admitted saying that because stocks were too low and wearing a mask was gradually made mandatory and they told us to make our own masks.
  - johnchristopher 5y ago
- walrus01 5y ago
  They specifically recommended not wearing N95 masks, which were very scarce and in limited supply at the beginning of the pandemic. With the goal of maintaining the very limited supply for medical personnel, while cargo planes moved around the globe and production ramped up.
  - selimthegrim 5y ago
    N95s also need to be vacuum fit IIRC for max efficacy
  - wrycoder 5y ago
    They still are.
- shlant 5y ago
  > So yes it has lost its credibility. I feel like this black and white, "you get one chance" kind of bridge burning is very unproductive. When you look at these agencies not as omniscient entities but as what they are - a collaborative effort of many individuals - then you allow for the evolution of understanding. People can be wrong, especially in regards to more novel situations, so why should we view our institutions as any different? Yes having more eyes and varied perspectives means that it may make sense to expect something more reliable than an individual, but that doesn't make it infallible and IMO that's ok.
  - janto 5y ago
    Organisations of professions should be held to extremely high standards. They are entrusted with more and in return given more privileges than any simple "collection of people".
    - shlant 5y ago
      as I said, it makes sense to expect more from governmental bodies but that still does not mean an expectation of infallibility. High standards and impossible standards are worlds apart.
  - andreilys 5y ago
    It's not about being wrong, it's about intentionally misleading the public because you believe they are incapable of handling the truth (i.e. we have supply chain issues with masks because surprise outsourcing your supply chains to other countries has fatal flaws)
- benjaminwootton 5y ago
  Genuine question, why did they not lose credibility when they started recommending them due to political pressure rather than “the science”? As I understand it, there is still very flimsy scientific backing for the effectiveness of masks.
  - a9h74j 5y ago
    AFAIK at best it depends upon number of layers, what kind of layers, fit, droplets (and size) vs. aerosols, humidity, interpersonal distance and dwelling time, and of course ventilation. Given the framing of the "mask debate" in the US with essentially no frequent or defining mention of face covering quality/qualities, essentially it seems like Cargo-cult science at the restrictions/policy level. There are people who meet the requirements essentially breathing through stretched or O(500um) single-layer mesh. I have not looked closely enough at electret properties to know if meshes with larger pore sizes can really stop 0.06um virus particles. (Or 10nm according to this https://www.news-medical.net/health/The-Size-of-SARS-CoV-2-Compared-to-Other-Things.aspx https://www.news-medical.net/health/The-Size-of-SARS-CoV-2-C... )
  - mensetmanusman 5y ago
    For aerosols, cloth masks are an order of magnitude less effective than dipole charged N95 (which attract sub micron scale particles with a built-in electric charge in the fibers, it’s a high-tech process.)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
concordDance 5y ago
> I personally follow the CDC guidelines I don't believe you. Do you use a food thermometer when cooking food? Do you make sure to cook eggs until the yoke is firm? If you're a woman, do you make sure you never have more than 1 (alcoholic) drink in a particular day? Do you never eat rare steak? People ignore almost everything the CDC says in their regular lives as the CDC is completely optimizing for health, not quality of life.
- watwut 5y ago
  I definitely never eat rare steak. It does not tastes good.
- LordAtlas 5y ago
  Those are FDA guidelines, not CDC. And the word is "yolk", not "yoke".
  - concordDance 5y ago
    Found them on cdc.gov. e.g. https://www.cdc.gov/foodsafety/foods-linked-illness.html https://www.cdc.gov/foodsafety/foods-linked-illness.html
- codelord 5y ago
  Not sure why would you go and make a statement about me without any evidence (And btw yes to all your questions). Your point would be stronger if you don't target a person and maybe talk about the average consumer. My point exactly that a large chuck of the population don't follow CDC guidelines, if they did we collectively would be a healthier nation.
  - concordDance 5y ago
    I'm quite surprised. I have never even heard of someone who did so I thought it was a good rhetorical point (and I think it would have been if you weren't an outlier).

andreilys 5y ago

The CDC/surgeon general recommended not wearing masks at the beginning of the pandemic, while Silicon Valley was way ahead of the curve (meanwhile hit pieces were posted by journalists with an axe to grind saying they we’re overreacting). So yes it has lost its credibility.

dimator 5y ago
This is the citation I found for this claim: https://www.snopes.com/news/2020/04/06/the-cdc-now-recommends-wearing-a-mask-in-some-cases/ https://www.snopes.com/news/2020/04/06/the-cdc-now-recommend... Overall, science is a process. If research came out that changed the recommendations, well, that's how science works. This is no different in my mind than the gradual change in the recommendations towards cigarette smoking over the decades, only in this case it played out over weeks and months (that article was from April of 2020). If you want something infallible and written in stone from day 1, that's what religious texts are for. But to claim that scientists lost credibility because new research led them to change their minds is to misunderstand the purpose of science.
- Mountain_Skies 5y ago
  Masks weren't a mysterious new invention that the CDC just learned about at the start of the pandemic.
  - skocznymroczny 5y ago
    Also their usefulness is very limited outside of virtue signalling.
- acituan 5y ago
  > science is a process. If research came out that changed the recommendations, well, that's how science works. CDC is a public health organization, not a science making organization. Its responsibility is to make the competent public health decisions based on the best available data and sound risk management. No one is faulting CDC for eventually course correcting, they are criticizing it for not having followed a more risk averse strategy from the get go and not having communicated their rationale honestly. Imagine if FDA behaved like CDC; roll out the vaccines to general public with minimal trial, updating their decision on safety as more data came in. Scientific incrementalism doesn't suit all use cases, and this has nothing to do with infallibility.
  - joshribakoff 5y ago
    > updating their decision on safety as more data came in. That’s literally what they do. They paused when there were concerns over blood clots, then expanded access to more cohorts as more studies were completed.
    - acituan 5y ago
      "with minimal trial" is the operative word, which didn't happen. The point being there is a balance between waiting for perfect data and making risk based policies.
- bourgwaletariat 5y ago
  Do you actually remember this in real time? Do you remember at the beginning when everyone was wondering what to do and they said wear a mask and then they said not wear a mask and everyone around you was like, "What?? What is going on??" And then a short while later they said wear a mask again. These things have real world ramifications. You can't just point to a snopes a year later and retain the context within which this trust destroying episode went down. People have memories. They felt the frustration. They felt the betrayal. And they have yet to recover from that. To dismiss that very real feeling of betrayal as "well, this is what snopes says" is rewriting history. And, all of that comes on the heels of big tobacco, DDT, thalidomide, BPA, climate change, and then the new climate change, big pharma with their oxycontin and big medicine fleecing Americans and they won't even discuss medicare for all and we have to protect corporate profits over saving humanity?? Seriously?? And you dismiss all that with "science is a process." Except the process has been completely dismissed as well. Science created the process that takes years to approve a new vaccine, all of that has been completely dismissed exactly when a brand new technology for creating vaccines has been created. No part of this is science. This is politics. Period. 8 Months ago Kamala Harris herself said she would NOT get Trump's Vaccine. And so now it's somehow a different vaccine that we should all get? Now folks who don't want to get Biden's vaccine are science deniers? This. is. not. science. This is politics and a lot of people are refusing to get the vaccine purely because it's politics and NOT science. Did you watch Fauci get destroyed up there this week? He's a liar. Period.
herbst 5y ago
Our Swiss virus guy too told this 'lie' in the beginning, a few months later he explained that this was wrong and the only reason he said masks are not necessary was because there weren't enough and private people were already stockpiling it anyway. So people wore masks and life went on. I still don't understand why sooooo many countries can't be more honest about these things
- paganel 5y ago
  > I still don't understand why so many countries can't be more honest about these things Depending on the jurisdiction and on your political opponents what the Swiss virus guy did is liable to send you to prison for intentionally lying and acting on that lie when employed as a public servant. Most probably the political debate is less vicious in Switzerland and that won't happen to your virus guy, but where I live (EU country from Eastern Europe) that would have been very dangerous for him to do in regards to his freedom. I guess that's why a lot of politicians double down on their lies, because if they're caught there's a small chance of them going to prison for them, so why take the risk?
  - herbst 5y ago
    Interesting point. Guess it comes down to his words as the initial wording was more like 'in the current situation it is not necessary to wear masks' not trump's vision of 'masks don't work' which would have been an obvious lie.
    - johnchristopher 5y ago
      In Belgium we had a third version: "masks are dangerous because people don't know how to adjust and wear them, they touch them too much (spreading the virus) and masks give a false sense of security that will lead to more contagions". The chief of our CDC equivalent said he was shopping in supermarket without mask. Then they admitted saying that because stocks were too low and wearing a mask was gradually made mandatory and they told us to make our own masks.
- johnchristopher 5y ago
walrus01 5y ago
They specifically recommended not wearing N95 masks, which were very scarce and in limited supply at the beginning of the pandemic. With the goal of maintaining the very limited supply for medical personnel, while cargo planes moved around the globe and production ramped up.
- selimthegrim 5y ago
  N95s also need to be vacuum fit IIRC for max efficacy
- wrycoder 5y ago
  They still are.
shlant 5y ago
> So yes it has lost its credibility. I feel like this black and white, "you get one chance" kind of bridge burning is very unproductive. When you look at these agencies not as omniscient entities but as what they are - a collaborative effort of many individuals - then you allow for the evolution of understanding. People can be wrong, especially in regards to more novel situations, so why should we view our institutions as any different? Yes having more eyes and varied perspectives means that it may make sense to expect something more reliable than an individual, but that doesn't make it infallible and IMO that's ok.
- janto 5y ago
  Organisations of professions should be held to extremely high standards. They are entrusted with more and in return given more privileges than any simple "collection of people".
  - shlant 5y ago
    as I said, it makes sense to expect more from governmental bodies but that still does not mean an expectation of infallibility. High standards and impossible standards are worlds apart.
- andreilys 5y ago
  It's not about being wrong, it's about intentionally misleading the public because you believe they are incapable of handling the truth (i.e. we have supply chain issues with masks because surprise outsourcing your supply chains to other countries has fatal flaws)
benjaminwootton 5y ago
Genuine question, why did they not lose credibility when they started recommending them due to political pressure rather than “the science”? As I understand it, there is still very flimsy scientific backing for the effectiveness of masks.
- a9h74j 5y ago
  AFAIK at best it depends upon number of layers, what kind of layers, fit, droplets (and size) vs. aerosols, humidity, interpersonal distance and dwelling time, and of course ventilation. Given the framing of the "mask debate" in the US with essentially no frequent or defining mention of face covering quality/qualities, essentially it seems like Cargo-cult science at the restrictions/policy level. There are people who meet the requirements essentially breathing through stretched or O(500um) single-layer mesh. I have not looked closely enough at electret properties to know if meshes with larger pore sizes can really stop 0.06um virus particles. (Or 10nm according to this https://www.news-medical.net/health/The-Size-of-SARS-CoV-2-Compared-to-Other-Things.aspx https://www.news-medical.net/health/The-Size-of-SARS-CoV-2-C... )
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  For aerosols, cloth masks are an order of magnitude less effective than dipole charged N95 (which attract sub micron scale particles with a built-in electric charge in the fibers, it’s a high-tech process.)

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

concordDance 5y ago

> I personally follow the CDC guidelines I don't believe you. Do you use a food thermometer when cooking food? Do you make sure to cook eggs until the yoke is firm? If you're a woman, do you make sure you never have more than 1 (alcoholic) drink in a particular day? Do you never eat rare steak? People ignore almost everything the CDC says in their regular lives as the CDC is completely optimizing for health, not quality of life.

watwut 5y ago
I definitely never eat rare steak. It does not tastes good.
LordAtlas 5y ago
Those are FDA guidelines, not CDC. And the word is "yolk", not "yoke".
- concordDance 5y ago
  Found them on cdc.gov. e.g. https://www.cdc.gov/foodsafety/foods-linked-illness.html https://www.cdc.gov/foodsafety/foods-linked-illness.html
codelord 5y ago
Not sure why would you go and make a statement about me without any evidence (And btw yes to all your questions). Your point would be stronger if you don't target a person and maybe talk about the average consumer. My point exactly that a large chuck of the population don't follow CDC guidelines, if they did we collectively would be a healthier nation.
- concordDance 5y ago
  I'm quite surprised. I have never even heard of someone who did so I thought it was a good rhetorical point (and I think it would have been if you weren't an outlier).