> Given the virtually unlimited executive powers the CDC believes it has
Care to elaborate? CDC has historically been an extremely powerful organization devoted to the safety of the US public.
Care to elaborate? CDC has historically been an extremely powerful organization devoted to the safety of the US public.
They are a government institution, and not to be blindly trusted. They require oversight above and beyond what private institutions require. I'm not sure why you want to give them the benefit of the doubt here.
A few of the best ways to lose your individual autonomy are to die or become ill or disabled.
Optimizing for as little of that as possible across society is a good thing for individual freedoms.
The CDC unliterally...
* Outlawed all evictions * Mandated masks on airplanes and public transportation * Banned migrants at the border * Grounded the entire cruise industry
And it's not that those things shouldn't be done. It's that they were done by a body with no checks and balances. None - whatsoever. There should not be a body in our government that can just make laws undemocratically. Or should there? This should be a cause of concern for everyone.
There's no question the CDC increased deaths by calling masks ineffective at the beginning of the pandemic. Their credibility never recovered, especially not when they are still flip flopping to this day (recommendations on masks oscillated by the week, often in response to public sentiment/political pressure -- not science).
There was a poll [1] on this specific question (from May 2021 - so right in the middle of the pandemic), and as of then only 52% of Americans felt that the CDC was trustworthy. That factor alone is going to dramatically outweigh any sort of benefit of their lie. And of course it wasn't just the lie, but their general behavior which frequently came off as extremely disingenuous.
In anything even vaguely approaching the longrun, honesty always win. Because while lies may create more optimal outcomes in the extreme shortrun, the decline in trust it causes ultimately means we start getting to play out the fable of The Boy Who Cried Wolf on a societal level. And that's not pleasant.
[1] - https://cdn1.sph.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/94/202...
I'd say the worst thing about the past two years is how it's proven how absolutely fucked we are if anything more dangerous and lethal than Covid comes along. There'll be people like this making every effort to prevent governments from doing anything to protect people.
Turns out there are a lot of anarcho-capitalists out there, especially present here on HN, and especially loud during pandemic-related topics. And i thought it's one of those historical things that theoretically exists today as a fringe ( like actual neo-Nazis).