The Undermining of the CDC

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/12/08/the-undermining-of-the-cdc

by bookofjoe • 8 months ago

113 100 8 months ago

bookofjoe• 8 months ago

The privilege that American scientists have taken for granted—one that is now being trampled—is the ability to go about their work free of political interference.

Hilariously blinkered.

jfengel• 8 months ago

It really did work like that. Government agencies in general are largely insulated from politics. You do your day to day work and wouldn't even notice a change of administration.

The political appointees set the overall direction, and so projects come and go -- more or less at the same rate as they do even under the same administration.

Having the President interfere so directly with ongoing operations is unprecedented. Maybe that's a good thing; people wanted a change and they got it. But it's not usual.

gandalfgeek• 8 months ago

Government agencies in general are largely insulated from politics.

This was obviously false during the pandemic when these “health” agencies did what the White House wanted, from the actual “science” to the messaging.

matkoniecz4• 8 months ago

"largely insulated from politics" note that claim they made is that in past there was no political interference at all, not that it was smaller or manageable

epistasis5• 8 months ago

For there to be democracy, there must be accountability. For there to be accountability, there must be some sense of truth, and under that some sense of trust of each other.

What we have seen happen over the past decade is quite similar what happened in Russia in decades before it: complete dismantling of trust, of the idea of truth, of the idea of honesty or integrity. And in that space of uncertainty, a new sort of ruling class is enabled to control the population.

Anti-vaxxers used to be a tiny minority, and living in a crunchy leftish area, they were concentrated around me, and I got into arguments with them all the time. Now, they are no longer leftists, they are MAHA/MAGA, because their fundamental view of the world is not left/right, it's authority/antiauthority. Vaccines were rejected as much because of the idea of an authority "knowing stuff" as it is about the ickiness of something impure being injected into the body, as much as they love the idea of "everything natural" including "natural" infectious disease.

We've destroyed the idea of expertise and authority based on knowledge that's open to anybody who wants to put in the time to learn, and replaced it with authority that exists merely because it hated the past authority, and became what it hated.

api• 8 months ago

“Trust arrives on foot and leaves on horseback.”

In my life there have been two huge destructions of public trust.

The first was the Iraq war, which could only be the result of either bald faced lies or gross incompetence or both. We blundered into the desert and set a trillion dollars and countless lives on fire and have nothing to show for it. Tons of people across the spectrum knew this was a terrible idea and were silenced or ignored.

The other was the 2008 bank bailouts. The problem isn’t that the state stepped in to avert a depression. The problem is that they did it by handing the very people who caused the crash a bonus and a promotion and then proceeded to reinflate the housing bubble to lock two generations out of home ownership. The response was that the Eastern establishment saved itself at the expense of the country, or that’s how it looked to a ton of people all across the country and the political spectrum including myself.

There have been smaller cuts but those are the big obvious ones.

You could never get a Trump or an RFK Jr without these two things.

Unfortunately these two characters are not reformers. They are vultures. They are frauds and con men dining on the corpse of trust.

I’m not Russian but I imagine that the failure of the Soviet regime and the hollowness of its propaganda did a number on trust over there, and that Putin and his allies are likewise vultures.

whateveracct3• 8 months ago

uhh I think various parts of Trump's presidency seem to be tantamount to those things. Jan 6, for instance.

mschuster91• 8 months ago

You could never get a Trump or an RFK Jr without these two things.

Fully agree with the rest but not with this. Pure and simple economic devastation is enough - yes, the Iraq war did a number on y'all... but most countries in Europe didn't join in on that particular shitshow and still got our version of Trump.

Hell I'd say even the 2008 bank bailouts aren't the problem. The uber rich looting the country for all it's worth, that's been a staple of human society, it doesn't mean automated flip to fascism.

IMHO, the true problem rather is that we (i.e. Western countries) allowed unrestricted trade with Asia, in particular China and India - our greedy big corporations swooped in and moved a lot of economic activity providing decent paid jobs of all skill levels there. Production mostly went off to China, service (i.e. callcenters) to India, high-tech to South Korea and especially Taiwan. And there was nothing domestic, other than maybe be a drone in an Amazon warehouse or Walmart (that, in turn, destroyed even more decent paid jobs in small retail!), to provide alternative gainful employment.

That is what destroyed democracy the most - the devastation and the utter ignorance of politicians.

kasey_junk2• 8 months ago

“ The other was the 2008 bank bailouts. The problem isn’t that the state stepped in to avert a depression. The problem is that they did it by handing the very people who caused the crash a bonus and a promotion and then proceeded to reinflate the housing bubble to lock two generations out of home ownership”

What’s interesting about this telling of it is how it reinterprets history. You are complaining about a lack of trust based on, if not an outright lie, an extremely biased narrative. The most obvious missing piece is you don’t mention the auto makers or uaw workers at all. Or that you say “reinflate the housing bubble” instead of “subsidize mortgages on houses that should have been repossessed”. We forced banks that did have proper risk controls to take tarp funds and the attached compensation limits against their will and made money on many of the assets we bought with tarp funds.

There is a trust gap, but it’s not some one way problem of coastal elites selling fables to enrich themselves and the good proletariat being duped. It’s at least as much a story of the populace not using critical reasoning skills to understand multifaceted and nuanced issues, which I suspect is not new.

ryandrake3• 8 months ago

You could never get a Trump or an RFK Jr without these two things.

We've had many of these trust-destroying events in the past, before the Iraq war, but their effects were limited. What we didn't have back then, and what I'd argue brought us Trump and RFK Jr., was a world-wide information-distributing machine and a megaphone in every idiot's (and malevolent foreign actor's) pocket. We're here because anger, belligerence, conspiracies, distrust, hatred, and ignorance are being deliberately spread on Internet platforms by 1. adversaries motivated to destabilize the country and destroy its institutions, and 2. domestic idiots who help to spread it (and make a buck off of its popularity).

I used to think that "platforming everyone" was a noble goal, but we're seeing the results.

conradev2• 8 months ago

We also subjected a lot of the population to vaccine mandates in order to retain their employment. That makes sense for some workers, sure, but it bred a lot of resentment toward authority.

epistasis5• 8 months ago

It wasn't the CDC doing vaccine mandates, it was some employers, by their own choice.

If the mandates were the problem, wouldn't people hate their employers for doing that, not the CDC?

It's certainly not the first time people have been required to be vaccinated. I remember talking to some people in the military, who were very upset about the COVID vaccine, yet they get so many more vaccines all the time. Why would they be upset about vaccine mandates for COVID out of nowhere, when they get far more vaccines as a matter of course and have for decades?

There's something new in the information space, specifically about COVID and vaccines, and maybe it is such an irrational thing as trying to destroy the CDC because of some employers' mandates for vaccines, because under this all its irrationality, but I don't understand it.

Arainach3• 8 months ago

It didn't for decades until bad actors spewing lies worked to spread distrust in the system.

croes2• 8 months ago

Doesn’t the military mandate vaccines for decades

abe_m7• 8 months ago

The alternate take is that improved information publishing and distribution platforms (the internet) have allowed the exposure of some pretty corrupt and questionable relationships between the authorities and the industries they regulate (regulatory capture).

Previously people only got their information from the authorities and newspapers. Newspapers were owned by the industries (either directly, or via advertising). Now we can see diverse view points from others in various fields, and it is clear when "doctors say ..." that doesn't mean that all doctors believe that to be true. We can now see that NIH scientists that approve drugs are allowed to approve drugs where they have a patent and commercial interest in the drugs they are approving, which is mind-bendingly wild that level of corruption is allowed.

People can also question where the studies are to back guidelines from authorities. Like what is the scientific basis of the food pyramid? Turns out that was created by the Department of Agriculture to support grain farmers, not because it is a good diet for humans. Or that the deaths and injuries for many infectious diseases had significantly declined before their respective vaccines hit the market, and that the authorities have been cherry picking the points of the graph to hide how much of the improvement happened before vaccines were available.

The biggest change is the availability of diverse voices in an industry being able to be heard, rather than just a select few chosen by "authority", aka power, aka money.

ryandrake3• 8 months ago

Unfortunately, for every "questionable relationship between the authorities and the industries they regulate' being exposed by citizen journalists and the power of the internet, there are 10 wild conspiracy theories with no basis in fact being spread. And for every 1 of those conspiracies being spread, there are 10 grifters out there making a buck selling products and services based around them. The Internet was a great idea that has not held up against stupidity and greed.

jauntywundrkind4• 8 months ago

Once again finding the "diversity of opinions" so so so bizarre a recent invention. Which is so weird, because I do believe there's plenty of corruption in the medical system, that the US's is a deeply corporate affront. I'm so near to finding "anti authority" vibes to resonate on.

But everything happening now is a deep insult, to inquiry, to science, to this nation, to life. The people running the show right now embody everything you are saying, are exactly this case. But not a one of the folks running HHS seems able to hear anything except what they've a-priori chosen to believe. Why Is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. So Convinced He’s Right? I believe accurately reflects a delusional hyper-reality, where health is being governed by a select few who have wrapped a deeply politicized reality around themselves as shield to the world, and alas these very few very special actors are now running the show. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/01/rfk-jr-public-h...

Diversity of voices is once again, just as it is at universities, being used to try to force it's way through the paradox of tolerance, to demand a seat at the table not for interesting suppressed voices, but for violent active harm seeking & destruction. That is not well founded either, that does not even attempt to engage to make its case.

dekhn• 8 months ago

I'm confused by your statement "We can now see that NIH scientists that approve drugs are allowed to approve drugs where they have a patent and commercial interest in the drugs they are approving, which is mind-bendingly wild that level of corruption is allowed."

The NIH does not approve drugs. If you have a citation that I can read that clarifies this point, I'm happy to read it.

danaris3• 8 months ago

because their fundamental view of the world is not left/right, it's authority/antiauthority

Except that (given the vagaries of the English language) that sounds like they would be "anti-authoritarian", but they're exactly the people cheering on the current authoritarian government.

However, I suspect that the sense of "authority" you mean is more like "expertise", or "intellectual", with a dash of "perceived establishment" thrown in.

(No shade on you for this—like I said, English is frequently ambiguous and tricky to clearly word things in.)

tstrimple• 8 months ago

I think this gets lost somewhat in the distance between how conservatives describe themselves and how they actually behave. They cry the loudest about some vague "FREEDOM!" but are actively cheering on the blatant violation of human rights in the country. They pretend to be "individualists" but go out of their way to make fun of and ostracize people who don't conform to their version of "normal". Practically every position they state is directly contradicted by the things they support. They get to carry this "fiscally responsible" badge despite never once being accountable for delivering on that promise. Their entire ideology is based on lies and bad faith and it shows by the people they keep electing.

Izkata• 8 months ago

No, their concern was specifically over mRNA and how it might screw with the body.

Over 2021 and 2022 it very much felt like the pro-vaccine crowd was the anti-science crowd: While they were dismissing all concerns with things like the overly-simplistic "that's not how it works, it's DNA -> RNA -> proteins like we learned in school", the MAGA crowd was talking about reverse-transcriptase enzymes and sharing studies like https://www.mdpi.com/1467-3045/44/3/73

Their concerns were never addressed, just ignored. It's not surprising they stopped trusting authorities like the CDC.

intended2• 8 months ago

Form what its worth, I urge people to pick up Network Propaganda.

Online speech, moderation and regulation are things I am focused on, and this book does a better job of putting all the parts together.

You can often hear someone on HN talk about “I would rather have many voices than let someone decide what is true.”

Thing is, that is standing up at a battle line which has been flanked entirely.

In the simplest sense - the information economy is no longer functional. Its been co-opted by private=government mutations. None of the old hacker culture rhetoric is graded to combat it.

The current shtick is to promote a fringe theory. Have a talking head state the fringe theory on Fox. Then have a government functionary state that the Fox mentioned said theory. Then have Fox state that a government functionary mentioned said theory. If you are someone who has a counter theory, you just don’t get platformed.

wakawaka282• 8 months ago

Thing is, that is standing up at a battle line which has been flanked entirely.

If you think for yourself, this doesn't really matter.

If you are someone who has a counter theory, you just don’t get platformed.

You keep mentioning this stuff from a liberal perspective but conservatives and free thinkers have been fighting this fight on social media for years as policies they disagreed with were promoted unilaterally and everything else was censored and suppressed. People were at risk of losing their jobs and being sent into exile over not wanting to take a vaccine. "My body, my choice" doesn't count when it comes to that.

The information economy is full of shills and AI bots, but that does not in and of itself prevent you from finding your own reliable sources of information. Censorship would stop you from finding it, however. Mandatory online ID would also hurt the flow of sincerely communicated information.

wakawaka282• 8 months ago

We've destroyed the idea of expertise and authority based on knowledge that's open to anybody who wants to put in the time to learn

Let me stop you right there. Actual credentialed experts who disagreed with the mainstream narratives put forth by other experts were censored, had their careers threatened, and were lumped in with "anti-vaxxers". Social media was censored. If you want to win people over and get them to trust you, you need to accept that they may not agree with you, and you don't get to silence them. The financial interests of pharmaceutical companies further muddy the waters.

There exists a large set of "experts" in every field of interest who want you to know that their work is absolutely essential and if you disagree with them, you're wrong. Some of these fields have massive epistemological issues and conflicts of interests. These experts are often proven to be extremely wrong. Sometimes, the best thing you can do in life is to disregard the "experts" and trust your own personal interpretation of a situation, and "do your own research"... If nobody ever thought different from "experts" we would still be in the dark ages thinking that the sun revolves around a flat Earth.

NotGMan• 8 months ago

Doctors should wear pharma sponsorships on their coats like Formula 1 drivers do. Would put things into perspective.

epistasis5• 8 months ago

They do, on their publications. It's all there. And it's not as pervasive as you might think.

I remember a very famous cancer researcher who destroyed his career by not disclosing these relationships:

https://cancerletter.com/the-cancer-letter/20180914_1/

Now, he's on the extreme end because no other cancer researcher has ever gotten quite that much, as far as I know. But there aren't even accusations that he gave favorable results to any drugs form companies that sponsored him, as far as I have every heard, it was merely that he didn't disclose that destroyed his career.

This is a level of honesty and transparency that does not exist in most of society, and we should be proud in the US that science is so clean compared to every other aspect of our society.

And for all the big money, pharma is far far more honest than grifters like those in the anti-vaxxer space who do not disclose how they are making their money, and who do directly benefit from pushing unproven experimental treatments that do not go through the same rigorous vetting that standard pharma does.

Calavar• 8 months ago

Doctors do, as required by federal law. You can look up any doctor you like:

https://openpaymentsdata.cms.gov

matkoniecz4• 8 months ago

The privilege that American scientists have taken for granted—one that is now being trampled—is the ability to go about their work free of political interference.

Communism style solutions ("it is better to have everyone being extremely poor, rather than having some poor and some rich people") is a terrible solution. Trampling on everyone because other group got trampled earlier is not a solution at all.

Presenting insane and deadly pseudoscience as science is stupid, dangerous and will kill people.

But claiming that there were no problems whatsoever and no political interference at all is a really dubious claim. This kind of reality denial is unhelpful and further erodes whatever trust was left.

whateveracct3• 8 months ago

I think you're taking issue with the wrong thing here lol. There may have been something before (it's the real world after all), but what RFK is doing is quite frankly insane.

matkoniecz4• 8 months ago

what RFK is doing is quite frankly insane.

oh definitely - that is why I have not commented on this part of article, as I agree that such pseudoscience is simply idiotic, dangerous and will kill people and I am in agreement that it is bad

But this part made me go "really? really? really?" - this kind of reality denial is not helpful either and prompted my comment. And they could phrase it a bit more mildly for far greater accuracy.

I edited my initial comment a bit.

croes2• 8 months ago

Even in communism some were richer than others

swed420• 8 months ago

Both Repubs & Dems have lots of blood on their hands for their intentional mishandling of COVID (continued to this day, since the pandemic is not over) in service to our archaic consumption-first economy:

https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/how-the-press-manufactured-co...

https://web.archive.org/web/20240802024326/https://docs.hous...

Capital interests own and control both parties, so it's no surprise we are getting results where it's okay to set the meat grinder to high.

dreamcompiler• 8 months ago

We are embarking on a population-level Darwin Award experiment. Once the stupid people die off the overall population's resistance to stupidity will increase a little bit.

But getting there means a huge number of innocent, non-stupid people will die.

FrustratedMonky• 8 months ago

Not even a joke.

States with lower Covid Vaccine coverage had more deaths.

Technically, are Red States correct that they will achieve herd immunity, by letting their weak die off?

Esophagus4• 8 months ago

Early in COVID, someone said to me, “survival rates are good - it’s only going to affect the weak.”

…without realizing the irony that he was mid-40s, overweight, and had had an acute heart problem.

The funny thing about the “natural immunity” crowd is that they don’t seem to grasp their own comorbidities.

Yet of the unvaccinated COVID patients admitted to hospital, 2/3 admitted they regretted not getting vaccinated.

I guess everybody’s brave until they’re in a hospital bed with a low pulse ox.

epistasis5• 8 months ago

What I find fascinating is the voting is this thread.

What I find to be reasonable comments from me are getting downvoting in a way that never usually happens on HN! Is it me? I didn't think that the HN community would turn so hard against the CDC and basic infectious disease research.

ryandrake3• 8 months ago

I was shocked by this during COVID. There's a huge anti-expertise, anti-institutions, anti-government-anything strain here, and they're very active on the various comment hiding buttons.

snowwrestler2• 8 months ago

It is the weekend HN effect. Conspiracy theories and low-information complaints thrive here on the weekends, presumably because of a weekly shift in audience demographics based on white collar working hours.

lapcat2• 8 months ago

What I find fascinating is the voting is this thread.

There's no reason to be fascinated. HN voting is generally inexplicable and random. For any given article, and even more so for any given comment, the "voter turnout" is extremely low, compared to the total HN user base. The votes depend crucially on which relatively small number of users happen to be around and reading at the time. It's always a mistake to project comment upvoting and downvoting into some kind of larger theory or conclusion.

Individual HN users upvote or downvote or neither for various, incongruous reasons. There's no unified theory or principle of voting.

add-sub-mul-div• 8 months ago

A main point about this era is that it's not about infectious disease research. It's been transformed into a culture war that supersedes anything having to do with science. It's become right-wing-coded to object to the science of infectious disease. Not all people who identify on the right succumb to this, but obviously many do, and those people are seen here in the comments section daily.

Gud• 8 months ago

What makes you think the stupid people will die off? Seems to me they're the ones breeding.

tim333• 8 months ago

I think the Idiocracy effect may win though.

robocat2• 8 months ago

Darwin Award > die

What matters is reproduction so unfortunately the Darwin Awards are often misleading (even Idiocracy is better at highlighting that reproductive success is what matters). Death is often irrelevant.

Covid deaths were mostly people past reproductive age, so you really can't generalize much about evolution from the deaths.

zeristor• 8 months ago

There’s the theory about grandparents presence helping their grand children, with wisdom.

Having watch the TV series it was pretty sobering that many were only being brought up by grandmothers.

Not that Wire is society, but it was deeply rooted in it. I’ve never been to Baltimore mind you.

jmclnx• 8 months ago

Between this and defunding of Univ. research plus the banning of $ for mRNA vaccine, the US just handed the future of Medical Research to China.

I have seen articles recently that states China now leads the word in mRNA research, which is the future of vaccine research.

Soon I expect the US to only allow praying over people for medical treatment, we are not far from that with the recent ACA changes.

robocat2• 8 months ago

China now leads the word in mRNA research

A big cross-section between civilian and military technology leads to strong military strength... E.g. manufacturing, drone parts, many commodity resources etc

SirensOfTitan2• 8 months ago

This essay rubs me the wrong way in that it continues to invest in this coastal elite attitude that the masses should do what we say because we are the experts. These people continue to miss the forest for the trees by avoiding the question: why have Americans lost faith in institutions?

I largely consider Trump a symptom of a larger disorder, I think it is lazy to assume that he and his administration is the source of the breakdown here.

Two thinkers come to mind to me in this case:

1. Hannah Arendt, particularly her writing in The Human Condition (and maybe as an analogue: the Anthony Downs book on Bureaucracy and perhaps Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society I think?):

Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant.

Another comment talks about accountability, but a bureau is composed of people "just doing their jobs" without the personal accountability that helps keep systems accountable.

Per Downs, bureaus eventually become mainly obsessed with their own survival over their original mandate, and it requires careful design to avoid this consequence.

2. Christopher Lasch: The idea that government institutions are required to force an centralized objectivity for democracy to survive is just about the opposite of what I think we actually need, per Lasch:

"[Specialized expertise is] the antithesis of democracy."
"Democracy works best when men and women do things for themselves, with the help of their friends and neighbors, instead of depending on the state."

The attitude as espoused in this essay will not do any work to re-establish trust with Americans, it continues a long line of unaccountability or reflectiveness from the "adults in the room" on their own contributions to the degradation of the system by pretending Republicans or Trump are a unique aberration.

conception• 8 months ago

You don’t think it’s more one party spending 40 years undermining Institutions to be able to gut them starting with Reagan’s “The Most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help’”? partially caused by the business elite working to gain influence over government since the Powell memo and partially caused by irrational fear of communism via socialism and partially by conservatives never wanting another Nixon and starting their own mouthpiece with Fox News, etc etc?

Seems more like a well concentrated effort to me.

throwawa14223• 8 months ago

I do not think it is fair to label a fear of communism or socialism as irrational.

terminalshort5• 8 months ago

Reagan's words resonated because the public already believed them. He is not the cause. The public's fear of government power is not remotely irrational. It is the responsibility of the government to maintain public trust, not the responsibility of the public to trust their authority.

digdugdirk• 8 months ago

Why have Americans lost faith in institutions? Because other institutions convinced them to.

Fox News, Heritage Foundation, Federalist Society, etc. This has been an organized effort for decades. It's embarrassing how "out in the open" the endeavour has been the whole time, that it can hardly be called a conspiracy.

oceansky• 8 months ago

Fox News was created because they didn't want another Watergate-level scandal be able to make R presidents lose popularity. It's surprising how effective it is.

Isamu2• 8 months ago

this coastal elite attitude that the masses should do what we say because we are the experts

I think this attitude, that the work the CDC and other boring agencies do is elitist, or that those who defend it are elitist, is the root of distrust. The fact is that these agencies do the long slogging boring work to establish what works and what doesn’t, only to be undermined in social media for clicks and ad impressions.

The CDC had a very good reputation around the world for the work it did. Since covid everyone on the internet is somehow a health expert and the actual people doing the mountains of boring and thankless work are now seen as nothing more than gatekeepers to the social media platforms.

terminalshort5• 8 months ago

On the recommendation of the CDC, large outdoor events were canceled because of the risk of disease spread. Then came the BLM protests and the CDC said "no, actually those are different." If you want to be a scientific authority, you must avoid saying things that anyone with an elementary school level knowledge of science knows is bullshit.

UncleMeat2• 8 months ago

It really is amazing that we've decided as a society that government bureaucrats and adjunct faculty are the elites of society while billionaires like Musk and Trump and the children of dynasties like RFK are counter-elite populists.

titzer• 8 months ago

coastal elite attitude

There's definitely a Science communication problem because Science isn't about who is saying the things, but facts speak for themselves. The reliability, repeatability, and accuracy of what people say is far more important than who they are or where they come from, or whether they live on the coasts or in the "heartland" or whatever.

It's a real problem that there are a lot of ignorant people in the US that cultivate and defend themselves from the "other"--those elite liberals. They make it about identity and in-group dynamics rather than about facts.

The rest of your comment is just flat-out attack against all institutions and government without even considering whether this evil "bureaucracy" is just another mundane structure to administer the boringness of a functioning government.

I think it is lazy to assume that he and his administration is the source of the breakdown here.

I mean, come on. Trump called COVID a "Democrat hoax" just weeks into the pandemic. Pile that on top of thousands of other lies and anti-science bullshit. Trump didn't build the bus that's carrying us off the cliff, but he and his supporters in the media have the gas pedal to the floor. They love people being ignorant and misinformed, and it's disgusting.

rdedev• 8 months ago

"[Specialized expertise is] the antithesis of democracy."
"Democracy works best when men and women do things for themselves, with the help of their friends and neighbors, instead of depending on the state."

These are nice sentiments to have but it does not work in the real world. At a certain point certain problems are too complex for a regular person to understand.

SirensOfTitan2• 8 months ago

If the world is too complex for a “regular person” to understand then universal suffrage is a mistake.

Just say what you mean: you want technocracy or some other non representative or democratic form of government.

josefritzishere• 8 months ago

There are moments when it looks like the plan is quite literally to cause a mass die-off. White that seems paranoid at best, and very cynical at best... that is the obvious outcome of low vaccine compliance. We can see this from death rates before the vaccine era.

nullocator• 8 months ago

I agree this is how it feels, its like the evil and corrupt of this country are actively convincing huge swaths of the poor and uneducated to basically undermine and kill themselves. A good chunk of this thread is a handful of people so detached from the actual plot that they are hell bent on carrying on a vendetta against a doctor and scientist they've never met, because they feel like his advice to the american people personally wronged them in some unforgivable and most egregious way.

When people can’t distinguish between the opinions of YouTube or Fox News commentators and decades of scientific research, it’s hard to know what the rest of us can do except watch in disbelief and abject horror.

vatsachak• 8 months ago

COVID protocols destroyed social ability in young people and I don't know if that was a price worth the small death rate in those below 50

They also furthered the anti-vaxx crowd, which is a bad thing

I think what people don't understand is that effects of the vaccine are smaller than the effects of the actual virus.

It was an accidental leak of a crafted virus from an internationally funded lab. The world was just SOL

jaybrendansmith• 8 months ago

We should all be concerned. I was watching Ken Burns, and it seems Washington ordered all his troops to be inoculated for Smallpox, and it made a huge difference in that war. Vaccines are good science, and the amount of testing we do to check safety is simply astonishing. We got extremely lucky with Covid-19, it was a warning shot, and we are taking away the wrong lessons from it. When bird flu comes with 50% mortality (half of the people you know will die, mostly children) we will go into complete lockdown with a required MRNA vaccine and we will thank God or Providence that we have people with the knowledge to make them.

anthonyknox1• 8 months ago

We live in the fattest and sickest country in the developed world; we were on our way to extinction long before the current administration took office, and the solutions are clearly not more of the same.

The Undermining of the CDC

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