Hacker News Reader

Comment by listless | Hacker News Reader

The CDC unilaterally ruled this country for the better part of 2 years. No checks. No balances. Now you could argue that the desperation of the situation calls for something more expedient than Democracy. But many people who supported the moves made by the CDC (including me) were equally horrified that it had as much power to do so.

View on HN

That is so wildly off the mark it is preposterous. State and local officials were almost entirely responsible for the actual implementation of pandemic response measures. And when various cities and states got tired of the pandemic (despite record deaths) they simply ignored the CDC.

It is kinda like saying well the church did not enact the crusades it was the various kings and sovereigns who did. Well yes, that is true, but the church through its messaging put it into motion.

"This is so wildly off the mark"...

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.

Sometimes I wonder whether some Americans actually know what governments do or what they're capable of doing. I'm not even sure they're aware of what they expect governments to be able to do. I always see these emotional reactions over something that is the whole point of having a government and its associated institutions and it's like... I didn't know you were an anarchist.

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.

> I didn't know you were an anarchist

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).

Your brain ends up completely fucked if your only source of information is opinion "news".

Can you explain this further? My recollection of the past 2 years is quite different, and my understanding of the US government structure is that our elected representatives could overrule the CDC at any time.

Did you support them lying about mask effectiveness, destroying their credibility and leading to deaths?

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).

Documented reasoning behind that. Nobody said toilet paper was important and it became scarce. Imagine if they said masks were important. PPE would be impossible to get. Even worse than it already was. With stories like this coming to mind: https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/illinois-comptrollers-o...

In a democracy in particular, trust is the most important thing in society. Because actions are not guided by the truth, but by what people think the truth is. And when you lose trust, you lose the ability to influence people's perception of that. In a society where a group is perceived as partisan, they end up only being able to influence a fraction of society.

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...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com