Here is the typical timeline of a CDC recommendation:
- Somebody publishes research suggesting that things have changed. This gets reported.
- A cadre of loud and persistent critics begins demanding that the CDC skip its usual bureaucratic dilly-dallying and change its guidelines now. Science has spoken. This gets reported.
- Someone leaks the news that the CDC is thinking about announcing a change. This gets reported.
- The CDC announces new guidance. This gets reported
- A new pack of critics begins yelling that the CDC blew it and the guidelines really should have stated something different. This gets reported.
- Someone finds a source in the FDA who says the the CDC never consulted with them, and this explains why they screwed things up. This gets reported.
- The CDC explains its guidelines with some added nuance. This gets reported.
- Every doctor and pseudo-doctor on TV, radio, and social media begins to loudly debate the guidelines. In newspapers and on local TV, reporters produce pieces listing the pros and cons of each side.
- After inhaling all this, half the country complains that the CDC waited too long. The other half complains that they acted too quickly and caved to political expediency. A third half complains that they just can't keep up with the CDC's constantly changing advice.
- Somebody publishes research suggesting that something else has changed. This gets reported
Rinse and repeat.
Welcome to the hair-trigger-media driven universe.
And the Twitterati and related internet commentator Wisdom of the millisecond.
the problem isn't the hair-trigger media. rather, it's the hair-brained commentariat who have an ax to grind. usually politically motivated hair-brained commentariat.
I put this post up on my blog today:
The Nobel Laureate economist Paul Samuelson famously acknowledged in a Meet the Press interview: “Well when events change, I change my mind. What do you do?” This observation applies to the advice from medical authorities such as the CDC and WHO during the COVID pandemic. Some members of the public are fond of pillorying these agencies for having published different guidelines at different times, as though health officials are in the business of issuing ex cathedra dogma rather than responding to incomplete and ambiguous information. Science doesn’t deal in proof, it deals with the weight of evidence. A scientific hypothesis is one that is capable of being tested and falsified by experiment.
I get it. I used to teach problem-based learning to first year medical students, and they often struggled with what to do with incomplete and ambiguous information, which is what physicians in clinics do every day. Sometimes, one cannot wait for all the tests to be completed and all the data analyzed before taking some action. With new evidence, a change in action is sometimes warranted.
Thanks to COVID, the curtain on research and discovery has been pulled away and the omniscient Oz is revealed to be a mere mortal doing their best with the resources at hand. So when new and better data appear, it is right and responsible to examine previous advice in light of those data. This happens all the time, even if most people don’t see it.
So rather than prating at the CDC for evolving standards in light of new data as though discovering that papal bull was found to be papal bull****, celebrate the fact that science is self-correcting and, overall, moves towards better understanding. To paraphrase MLK: “the arc of the scientific universe is long, but it bends toward truth.”
https://upfromfacebook.blogspot.com/2022/01/yes-cdc-can-change-its-mind.html
+1
That pithy remark about changing one's mind is usually attributed to Keynes. That's the first time I've heard Samuelson given credit. It's a good practice to follow, of course, either way.
"No direct evidence that Keynes made a comment of this type has been located by QI or other researchers. The earliest statement found by QI that fits this template was not spoken by Keynes but by another prominent individual in the same field, Paul Samuelson who was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in economics."
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/07/22/keynes-change-mind/
Yet "Meet the Press" today starts with a montage of shifts in CDC recommendations.....
It's become more "Press the Meat" than "Meet the Press."
Exactly!
I think the only place the CDC needs to be chided is the lack of mandatory in their guidelines. Maskings, quarantine, and testing don't work if they don't have minimums.
I respect that they can't force us to do so, but they should say what's a minimum.
+100
Now think of how we go about handling climate change...
Derping past the graveyard.
Yes. "Don't Look Up" was barely satire, at this point. And it was almost a relief when the comet hit.
Was Samuelson quoting Keynes?
Samuelson later attributed that to Keynes, but there's no independent verification that Keynes said or wrote that.
11: Various other entities adjust their own policies in light of the updated CDC guidance and still other entities saying follow the science get upset: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/01/amazon-is-reducing-its-covid-sick-leave-for-workers/
12: Meanwhile, the omicron variant is “raging” https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/01/hospitalizations-of-kids-under-five-increase-as-omicron-rages/ and an implicit dig at CDC not authorizing vaccination for young children is made, as pundits elsewhere suggest we need to learn to live with it.
Hospitalization under the age of 5 is no higher than 1 month ago.
13: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/09/new-york-omicron-coronavirus-covid-pandemic
The "quarantine" should never been that long in the first place. It was dumb.
About half wrong.
I'm always amazed at the inability of people to deal with uncertainty. Look, it's a "novel" coronavirus, right? Almost nothing was known about it initially, and it takes time to understand its behavior, especially since it's constantly changing. Any official advice is going to be preliminary and you're going to have to use judgment when applying it.
I guess critical thinking just isn't really a thing among either our elites or the public.
This. I can't tell you how many times I had to listen to idiots in the barbarshop going on about how they don't trust that slippery Fauci guy farther than they can throw him because at the beginning of the pandemic he said you didn't need to wear a mask, and then just a few weeks later, he tells everyone to mask up. Now they don't believe in anything anymore!
Kevin forgot nr. 10: Anti-vax cranks on Fox News then replay steps 1-9 over and over and proclaim that these "elite" scientists have no idea what they're talking about and that you should take horse dewormer and collodial silver to ward off Covid instead.
I do gin and tonic, just in case.
Hey, it works for malaria, so it must be as good as hyroxycholoroquine.
Anti-vax??l please. This is not a vaccine. Nor or they antivax. Either get the dialectical nonsense or stop posting.
Viagra is the new COVID wonder drug.
Viagra... which is produced by... Pfizer.
& just as the fauxgressive dirtbags attempted to sanctify rural Ivermectin heads as grasping at any readily available potential solution when the presumed solutions are unobtainable due to Big Pharmaceutical greed, even as Ivermectin is a product of Big Pharma, I assume the Jacobin will produce the Leftist Case for Popping DAT LIL BLUE PILL to Cure COVID.
Viagra at least has a vasodialation function that could ameliorate COVID symptoms and resist the damages of the virus in the short term. It's used for preventing high-altitude sickness, for instance.
But they point that you need it is kinda... Well, you wouldn't have, had you taken the vaccine.
“This gets reported.”
Who says journalism is dead? It sounds like we have too much “reporting”!
Dead idiots. 🍾🎆🤷♂️
https://digbysblog.net/2022/01/08/human-sacrifice-for-trump/
+1 dinner at Le Diplomate with Sonia Sotomayor
The public/pundit rage-fests seem a part of the American public's drift into absolutist, babyish, dogma-based thinking. Look at Bush the Lesser and his endless use of the infantile term "bad guys". Also, the bible-beater domination of the Republican Party and their reliance on immutable, fixed, scriptural "truth." Which, incredibly, can change for them daily, based on the current moods of their new dark god -- but that's OK!
The rise of what was once billed as "24 hour news" channels, which in fact amount to 24 hours of every opinionated talking head addressing the same small story -- or non-story -- over and over and over, all day long, has helped propel these stupidities and rushes to judgment, as has the speed of the several internet gossip "apps."
If the public was better at critical thinking, evaluating information, detecting bull, the problem wouldn't be as severe, and lots of companies would have to find other ways to make themselves filthy rich.
Real journalism is expensive and time consuming. Talking heads--not as much.
This +1 so much.
Not much to add to what's already been said; I will, however, note, that this farrago of nonsense is nothing more and nothing less than a calculated attack on both expertise (what's new about that though?), and more damningly, on the scientific method itself. A studied insult, as well, I suppose. You knew a lot of these people back in high school: the sort who thought that having to write a term paper, develop a defensible thesis and research their own friggin' opinion was punishment from beyond the pale.
This is nothing more than a phatic cry embraced by -- shared by -- the MSM: "You think you're all that just because you know stuff ... but you're not!"
It's not a attack on the scientific method idiot. The problem was the Trump Administration didn't follow through on a lot of evidence in the summer of 2020. For all the whining you people do, the Trump Administration was lax on removing restrictions on several areas where science showed no benefit.
Bottom's up in the air again, eh? To paraphrase Dr. McCoy, what the Shootie has said is unimportant and we do not hear his words.
And what were those, and the evidence was when?
Why are you short of cites and details?
The false harmony of coddling the incompetent and witless.
While this is a nice summary and totally accurate I am not willing to concede that the CDC did a top job communicating under Dr. Walensky.
Take the recent shortening of the quarantine for health care workers. It was a perfectly rational thing to do in the face of staff shortages all over the system. But it included the lack of testing after day 5. The CDC claimed this was unnecessary. They had earlier insisted that it was necessary and there seems to be no new data proving the opposite. So of course people, including many experts (not quotation marks here!), were critical. Then the CDC insisted they were right and denied that the rule had been this way because tests were in short supply. That was a lie but admitting the truth would have been an acknowledgment of failure.
The exact same problem occurred early on with masks: The communication ought to have been: Don't buy masks to wear, we need them urgently for hospital staff. A mask can't harm but for now please improvise with a handkerchief or something; don't deprive nurses and doctors of their PPE! Instead they said "you don't need masks". This "white lie" came back to bite them in the ass. And again this communication seems to have been chosen in order to avoid admitting to a serious failure: The failure to keep sufficient emergency stocks warehoused.