Via The Moderate Voice comes this piece at Reuters by Ned Parker and Chad Terhune on the CDC’s fumbles during the pandemic:
Critics have widely asserted that the CDC fumbled key decisions during the coronavirus scourge because then-President Donald Trump and his administration meddled in the agency’s operations and muzzled internal experts. The matter is now the subject of a congressional inquiry. Yet Reuters has found new evidence that the CDC’s response to the pandemic also was marred by actions – or inaction – by the agency’s career scientists and frontline staff.
At a crucial moment in the pandemic when Americans were quarantined after possible exposure to the virus abroad, the agency declined or resisted potentially valuable opportunities to study whether the disease could be spread by those without symptoms, according to previously undisclosed internal emails, other documents and interviews with key players.
[…]
“Yes, they were interfered with politically,†said Lawrence Gostin, director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University, referring to alleged meddling by the Trump administration. “But that’s not the only reason CDC didn’t perform optimally during COVID-19. There are a lot of things that went wrong.â€
Four top public health experts or ethicists told Reuters that the question of whether to test or engage in research on detained people has always been a sensitive topic. But all said the CDC should have proceeded given the fast-moving public health emergency.
Moreover, the CDC finalized rules in 2017 providing that medical testing was expressly allowed in quarantine, as long as participants were given the opportunity to give “informed consent†or opt out. Informed consent means giving people adequate information to understand the risks and benefits of a test or procedure.
I’m open to the idea that political interference is the source of the problem but I’d like to see evidence more concrete than OMB. I’m also open to the possibility that the CDC is underfunded but this graph suggests otherwise:
which does tend to support an observation I’ve made before: when you cap the supply and increase willingness to pay the foreseeable consequence is that wages will increase.
I’m beginning to think that the real problem was that we had the wrong people in the wrong place at the wrong time doing the wrong things in the wrong way and we didn’t notice until there was a crisis.
I told you before the guy they put in charge of the CDC had no public health experience, which is pretty unusual. He was the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time. Then he didnt exhibit the leadership needed in areas where he should have. The failed test they created was exactly what I would have expected if you left the geeks in charge.If I put my smartest, most book learned people in charge of a problem there is a 40% chance that they come up with a brilliant idea. There is a 60% chance they come up with some complicated, convoluted solution that is bound to fail because of its complexity. Rather than try to solve the one small issue I give them they will try to solve “everything”.
When managing the geeks you have to make sure they stay on track and solve what you asked them to solve. Its has to be workable. If you are the one watching over the guy in charge of the geeks you have to make sure he doesnt get talked into whatever clever solution they devise. (On the other side you also need to be able to figure out that occasional time when they really do need to come up with something awesome.)
In this case the CDC director did not step in when he should have. He either ignored them or got sucked in. The people at the White House to whom he reported did not make sure that he was doing his job either.
If the general lack of expertise in public health claimed in this article turns out to be true then that needs to be fixed. Public health needs to be one of the core missions for the CDC.
Steve
Looking backwards, it’s always been a problem of steering between the deadly rock of the virus and the truly hard place of economic displacement.
Early on, Curious Onlookers’ plan of mandatory quarantine combined with with full support,
(replaced wages,rental costs) might well have worked. The numbers are too big now. Have to ride it out.
Good news is people are reacting to bad virus news with more care and numbers have come down a bit.
Grey, it is never too late. I banged the drum about centralized/mandatory quarantine back in May. We still have several months to go with this pandemic, possible variants that render vaccines ineffective and future pandemics (given biology, it is inevitable).
My observation is the CDC has forgotten the institutional memory of dealing with pandemics with no pharmaceutical treatments. The last one was HIV in 1980’s, and before that Polio in the 1950’s.
As to that particular test. Sadly, even if the CDC was less cocky and relied on the WHO test, those test kits would still have failed. The CDC did a root cause analysis and found the lab manufacturing the tests was not kept to standard and “contamination” was assured. No matter the design, the CDC was going to produce faulty tests. The only chance of early detection was for the FDA to approve other labs to make tests; but the existing runbook was the CDC should initially be the sole source of tests for new infectious diseases.
And the guy to run that lab manufacturing tests was no mediocrity. He had successfully designed the test for Zika or H1N1.
Critics of this include people who also believe that our response should have been more centralized. The irony seems to be lost on them.
What institutional memory? Not only were neither polio nor HIV pandemics, the CDC dealt with neither. There’s still no vaccine against HIV. The best way of avoiding it is to avoid the high-risk behaviors associated with contracting it. The prevalence of HIV/AIDS is higher now than it was in the 1980s. There are some treatments available which weren’t available in the 1980s. I don’t know what the involvement of the CDC was in those.
Government had very little role in the development of polio vaccines—most funding came from private philanthropy.