I will say that the CDC really stepped in it with the "you don't need masks" message in the beginning. The message should have been, "Hey, we are pulling masks from the shelves for healthcare workers. Be careful out there until they are available. Here's how to make something at home that is better than nothing." The race to create a natural origin narrative was idiotic as well. People are stupid, beyond stupid, but I don't blame them for not trusting the CDC or the FDA. The FDA is a bad joke for more reasons than one can count. If they cared about health, they might actually address the fact that we subsidize colored sugar garbage instead of food, or let the opioid epidemic reach such staggering proportions. The CDC and FDA are clearly not outcomes based organizations.
I think the FDA is doing pretty well all things considered. The Aduhelm debacle was a problem of messaging, but I actually think it's pretty forward thinking given the disease (AD) that they're up against. The CDC on the other hand has been nothing but a catastrophe the whole time. I get that they've had some trouble navigating the Trump problem, but they have been slow to react to almost all new data. Some data, such as the evidence that it's really hard to get Covid outside, has been simply ignored. The 6 ft rule, which is complete nonsense, is another example where they have just ignored and derided actual evidence. You're seeing it again with their messaging on infection rates and infectiousness of vaccinated people. They pick a public stance based on some cherry picked or early evidence and that's what they go with. It's a nightmare. Not sure when the last time we've seen a government agency prepare for decades for an assured catastrophe fail so spectacularly.
"Heck of a job, Brownie" - era FEMA. Neither the CDC nor the FDA nor the WHO should be political entities. Yet they are. And politics has definitely overshadowed science on this one. Not sure when the last time we've seen a government agency prepare for decades for an assured catastrophe fail so spectacularly.
This is an important point buried in snark: when Trump came in, the careerists left. The government hollowed out like Venezuela. But when Trump left, the sycophants largely left with him - I mean, what's the point of having the title if you have to do the work? - which has left pretty much everything open for a new breed of careerists. I think the pandemic-response-unit-in-exile probably would have done things differently. And I think the fact that they've been conducting diplomacy without an embassy, essentially, put a real kink in the chain of command. The fact that the Trumpistas gave less of a shit about the CDC than pretty much anything else means that a lot of them lingered and tried to do what they needed to do in a hostile situation... but the actual pandemic brain trust had been long since fired and they were free to snark at the people running the show. I'm hopeful the CDC will get their shit together moving forward. Things should be less tangled than before. But there's still a hell of a tangle to un-knot and the whole "we can't have a World Health Organization if we lock China out" combined with "but obviously China needs to be locked out because they damn near ended the world through carelessness" dichotomy isn't going to resolve smoothly.
“ The CDC and FDA are clearly not outcomes based organizations.” Agree they are political organizations. Same caliber of folks that ran the Afghanistan war. Instead of managing the covid outbreak they are more concerned about providing cover for the politicians in charge. Think trump hurricane prediction map. 