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Comment by CGamesPlay | Hacker News Reader

Eh, if this turns out to be the next Theranos, then we'll be glad that the government stopped our innocent civilians from being duped by this trickery. It's kind of a double-edged sword.

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Thalidomide or maybe the Cutter Labs Polio vaccine might be a better comparison than Theranos.

What happens if I no longer trust our government to protect me from predatory business practices? I ask that, because I no longer trust the CDC after their series of recent scandals.

Ironically, it's largely due to successful Russian efforts that I no longer know who to trust for advice on vaccines.

From what we're hearing so far [1], it seems that POTUS will promise a vaccine is on its way just before the election, but then never deliver it. What I'm worried about, though, is that a vaccine will simply show up and start being rolled out by a compromised CDC, or FEMA, or Army, or whoever the administration can force to do it.

[1] https://www.axios.com/trump-cdc-redfield-vaccine-d266121c-88...

Maybe this is the October surprise? The rushed Russian vaccine that Trump’s friendly relationship with Putin helped to secure?

I wouldn’t put it past them to try.

> I no longer trust the CDC after their series of recent scandals

Care to link? Feel I must have missed some news, as I'm not aware of any scandals around the CDC?

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-cdc-says-americans-don...

https://www.foxnews.com/media/surgeon-general-explains-masks...

I mean, if not making wild guesses is considered a big scandal, well so be it, but I find it quite exaggerated to call this a "scandal". There was no lie, no one was mislead, they weren't even wrong in a sense. At first there was no evidence that masks could prevent the spread, and then there was a shortage of masks for medical workers who needed them, and only later did the data show that asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic transmission was possible, so there was now evidence to advice wearing a mask, even a non-surgical one.

You could say they are to be blamed from making the default position the status quo. But the opposite is a harder default, how far do you go when nothing has been shown to be necessary or prevent anything yet? Like do you tell people to just go full on quarantine? To wash all their delivered packages and produce with soap? Like how far? And then if you tell them to do all that, and it later shows they arn't necessary and don't help prevent the spread? So in some way, the status quo does seem like a good default.

Basically, the CDC just said: Go on with your daily life, don't panic, don't buy all medical equipment that the medical professionals need, and as the data arrives and shows evidence of what measures actually help to prevent the spread we will update our guidelines.

Posting stuff that was not approved by CDC scientists, as coming from the CDC is a pretty massive scandal however you want to slice it.

Sure, most of it comes down to the administration putting unqualified people with poor financial incentives in positions of high power.

There was this particularly transparent example by the Director of the CDC a couple of years ago, about buying tobacco stocks when put in charge of programs for reducing tobacco usage: https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/30/cdc-director-tobac...

Also this story about how FDA appeared to bend to political pressure to greenlight an experimental treatment due to political pressure, bypassing the normal guidelines for demonstrating efficacy: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/why-did-fda-autho...

There's also been a general failure to respond appropriately to the pandemic. We're so many months in and PPE is still an issue: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/8-months-into-pandemic-...

And that's not even counting what the White House is doing, which is not good. Especially with the recently leaked audio tapes from Woodward from the same time POTUS was publicly downplaying it: https://youtu.be/-cfd_pJVYiM?t=179

Plus the hydroxychloroquine thing...

There's a lot of buzz lately about how the administration is trying to influence the CDC, but most of it is journalism/politics blue twitter insider type chatter:

* https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/09/politico-trum...

* https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/trump-e2-80-99s-att...

* https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/09/politico-trum...

* https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-appointees-sou...

But there is a lot of it, and that's pretty unusual for an organization like the CDC. Maybe it's all disinformation, but keep in mind it's the President's job to appoint the Director of the CDC: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/03/trumps-cdc-dire...

I'm not saying every smear against the man is true. But after the last director had to resign over the tobacco thing, and the current director is now clearly affiliated with the President, so I'm skeptical if he has the public interest at heart.

I've never had less faith in American institutions, and I think it's for good reason. There's a lot of corruption at the top, and it's clearly infiltrating the institutions.

If they say a vaccine is safe to get, I don't think I can trust it. I'm going to need to dive deeper into opinions of professionals when it becomes available before I get it.

Hum, okay I see what you mean. I think maybe it's premiditated to conclude that it's untrusworthy yet, but I wouldn't blame anyone from being a bit skeptical and double checking with say the Canadian and European health institutions to see if the advice is similar, and if not that might need to trigger some investigation into why they'd differ so much? And I don't know, throw in China and South Korea and Russia in there as well, in theory, all country should advise pretty similar things, medical science is mostly universal so any major discrepancy would be disconcerting a bit I admit.

That said, I also don't want to fall into some fallacy of nirvana, I don't believe any governement ever existed in a perfect state with zero bias and total absence of corruption, sometime all we have is good enough to go by.

And I also wouldn't want to fall in the fallacy of inflation of conflict, where because there are scientific disagreement in the medical community, especially given a very new very unknown problem such as Covid, that no conclusion can be reached or that the legitimacy of that field of knowledge is questionable.

I agree with you entirely, and I think that will be my plan. It could be a problem though if US society is back to "normal" with a "vaccine" that ends up rushed through some how, and I'm one of a few crazy holdouts that don't trust it.

Would any of our Russian comrades reading along care to weigh in on how they're feeling about getting the vaccine on release day?

eugene3306 summarized it best: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24512974. As someone fairly familiar with Gamaleya I agree completely, they are known to be responsible for some "bullshit-micyn" drugs as we call it here, so I'd hesitate to be an early adopter for their vaccine. (also you'd get funny looks if you called someone comrade in Russia, just saying)

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