Reviving the US CDC
thelancet.com
thelancet.com
Why is pointing out abject incompetence an "unhelpful statement"? First step to solving any problem is acknowledging you have a problem.
Go to the CDC website yourself and try to understand the total mess they are publishing, full four months after the epidemic started in earnest. They should be the "gold standard" I agree. But they are not.
I have no idea how political things are at the CDC. Many there claim that they have had their budgets cut below workable levels. That's entirely consistent with the stated purpose of the current administration.
We should get used to not having anything useful at the federal level.
Snow Crash, here we come.
There's no reason to trust her assessment of the CDC. She wasn't criticizing the quality of their work--she was trying to cast doubt on the number of Americans who have died, because Trump doesn't want anyone to know how many Americans have died on his watch.
You can't improve public health without support and money.
Her comment, FTR:
> “When he gets new information, he likes to talk that through out loud and really have that dialogue — and so that’s what dialogue he was having. I think he just saw the information at the time immediately before the press conference and he was still digesting that information"
That's a very political way of saying he's a dangerous ignoramus.
Better to be fired and tell us everything that's been going on in the WH than to stay and keep enabling Trump.
Your suggestion is a little short on details. Please educate us, what a "proper response to the pandemic" would look like, in your opinion. But do also please use the _realistic_ options, short of authoritarianism, welding people in their homes, or assuming a limitless supply of domestically manufactured testing reagents and ppe.
Here’s the thing: places like South Korea and Germany seem to have a pretty good handle on this. Why can’t we in the US get our act together?
The same goes for Fauci, AFAICT. They've been doing damage control at press conferences, but I can't see any other good that's come of their presence than correcting some of the misinformation from Trump et al.