Three years after the pandemic lockdown, my distrust in the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is bigger than ever. Prior to 2020, I had assumed that the CDC took meaningful, well considered, effective actions to ensure public health except for particular situations, such as Lyme disease. Since my 1999 tick bite, I’ve blamed the CDC for misleading me into assuming that my tick bite couldn’t lead to Lyme disease: The CDC guidelines asserted that a tick must be embedded for 24 hours to transmit disease and mine was only embedded for 5 minutes, so I didn’t worry about Lyme disease. Afterward 2000, I knew the CDC had made a bad call about ticks and Lyme disease based on inadequate evidence (and outside the CDC pressure), but I didn’t doubt that the CDC was well equipped to manage a wide scale public health threat.
Very early in the pandemic, however, I ranted about the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in a local COVID-safe Facebook group, calling them out for their lousy COVID tests and their initial approach dismissing the need to wear masks. I know N95s and surgical masks were in short supply, but a good public health response could address that without setting the public up to view masks as useless.
A nurse in the group took offense with my distrust and lumped me in with anti-vaxxers and COVID-deniers, you know, the anti-science freaks. A few weeks later, however, the media reported on the flawed COVID test kits and finally even the CDC admitted the tests were poorly “designed and contaminated.” Earlier, I’d thought the CDC’s poor response was due to Trump’s influence, but even after 2021 I’ve continued complaining about the CDC ‘s actions and their failure to track suitable data on infections and consequences, particularly long covid.
As an immunocompromised disabled person, I’d hoped that the pandemic would bring about better standards for everyone’s health by protecting the most vulnerable people. Instead, we were left to fend for ourselves. Now, when the official public health emergency declaration expires in 11 days, so does tracking/reporting community transmission levels, free testing and other emergency benefits. California already eliminated the requirement for masks in health care settings in the beginning of April.
As a result of the CDC’s position, immunocompromised people cannot safely be in public and many others, particularly low income people, lose access to masks, test kits, Paxlovid and other help.
What do you think about how the CDC has handled the spread of a novel pathogen? In the poll below, vote for the grade you assign the CDC’s pandemic response.
People have written about the need to evaluate the CDC’s responses and revamp the systems before another pandemic forces us to do this all over again. This week, a New York Times opinion piece by the director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health asked, How Well Does Masking Work? And Other Pandemic Questions We Need to Answer.
But now we should have more data from this pandemic to guide our decisions. We don’t send rockets into space without collecting data to monitor their progress and detect if they are veering off course. And yet we witnessed more than one million Covid-19 deaths in the United States without a clear plan to assess whether we were doing all we could to prevent more.
We should be systematically studying pandemic mitigation efforts in order to learn which interventions are effective and how best to employ them. Just as important: We should do so with the understanding that the absence of evidence of effectiveness is not the same as having evidence of ineffectiveness.
But we should have put into place efforts to rapidly collect and assess high-quality data to understand whether masks were having optimal effectiveness and, if not, how to increase that effectiveness. We should have done this for other mitigations, too, like school and business closings and policies that required exposed contacts of cases to quarantine. Pandemic measures like masking and vaccination have been challenged by political leaders and in the courts. Without clear evidence at the population level that mitigation measures meaningfully change transmission rates, it will be harder to meet challenges that could block effective, lifesaving interventions.
The pandemic revealed major flaws in the U.S.’s public health system, from the top (CDC) to the local levels (city/county public health offices). The CDC continues to make headlines for their decisions and be questioned about their choices during the height of the pandemic.
A CDC official said the agency was “aware” of several confirmed cases that could be connected to the conference, but cautioned “the cases we’re aware of at this time should not be referred to as an ‘outbreak.’”
“These cases are reflective of general spread in the community. It’s not news that public health employees can get COVID-19,” CDC’s Kristen Nordlund wrote in an email.
If there is “general spread in the community,” why did the CDC hold a meeting and not take precautions like wearing masks? Why isn’t the agency spotlighting the need for air quality measures like better filtration and circulation?
“The CDC had some of the most technically gifted experts in the world. Yet the culture of the organization, emphasizing certainty before action, resulted in paralysis” on whether to warn about the spread of covid by aerosolized particles, the authors write, criticizing the agency’s too-late acknowledgment, for instance, that the virus could travel far longer distances than six feet. https://washingtonpost.com/books/2023/04/25/lessons-covid-war/… #cdnpoli #bcpoli
How do you grade the CDC?