America's CDC and 11 States Erroneously Conflated Two Kinds of Coronavirus Tests (theatlantic.com) 118
America's Center for Disease Control "is conflating viral and antibody tests..." writes the Atlantic, "distorting several important metrics and providing the country with an inaccurate picture of the state of the pandemic."
Thelasko shared their report: We've learned that the CDC is making, at best, a debilitating mistake: combining test results that diagnose current coronavirus infections with test results that measure whether someone has ever had the virus. The upshot is that the government's disease-fighting agency is overstating the country's ability to test people who are sick with COVID-19... The widespread use of the practice means that it remains difficult to know exactly how much the country's ability to test people who are actively sick with COVID-19 has improved.
"You've got to be kidding me," Ashish Jha, the K. T. Li Professor of Global Health at Harvard and the director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, told us when we described what the CDC was doing. "How could the CDC make that mistake? This is a mess...." By combining the two types of results, the CDC has made them both "uninterpretable," he said...
[T]he portion of tests coming back positive has plummeted, from a seven-day average of 10 percent at the month's start to 6 percent on Wednesday. "The numbers have outstripped what I was expecting," Jha said. "My sense is people are really surprised that we've moved as much as we have in such a short time period. I think we all expected a move and we all expected improvement, but the pace and size of that improvement has been a big surprise."
The intermingling of viral and antibody tests suggests that some of those gains might be illusory.
"The CDC is not alone in its errors," notes a Reason article shared by schwit1. "Several states have been blending their test results as well, rendering it difficult to determine the local impact of the virus." But the CDC's role as the officially designated first line of defense makes the agency's failure far more significant. Without clear, reliable, and accurate reporting from the CDC, it becomes nearly impossible to take stock of the pandemic's damage.
The virus has upended American life in ways that make it unusually difficult to predict the future. But thanks to the CDC, we have a problem that is even worse: No only do we not know what is going to happen, but we don't know what is happening.
Thelasko shared their report: We've learned that the CDC is making, at best, a debilitating mistake: combining test results that diagnose current coronavirus infections with test results that measure whether someone has ever had the virus. The upshot is that the government's disease-fighting agency is overstating the country's ability to test people who are sick with COVID-19... The widespread use of the practice means that it remains difficult to know exactly how much the country's ability to test people who are actively sick with COVID-19 has improved.
"You've got to be kidding me," Ashish Jha, the K. T. Li Professor of Global Health at Harvard and the director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, told us when we described what the CDC was doing. "How could the CDC make that mistake? This is a mess...." By combining the two types of results, the CDC has made them both "uninterpretable," he said...
[T]he portion of tests coming back positive has plummeted, from a seven-day average of 10 percent at the month's start to 6 percent on Wednesday. "The numbers have outstripped what I was expecting," Jha said. "My sense is people are really surprised that we've moved as much as we have in such a short time period. I think we all expected a move and we all expected improvement, but the pace and size of that improvement has been a big surprise."
The intermingling of viral and antibody tests suggests that some of those gains might be illusory.
"The CDC is not alone in its errors," notes a Reason article shared by schwit1. "Several states have been blending their test results as well, rendering it difficult to determine the local impact of the virus." But the CDC's role as the officially designated first line of defense makes the agency's failure far more significant. Without clear, reliable, and accurate reporting from the CDC, it becomes nearly impossible to take stock of the pandemic's damage.
The virus has upended American life in ways that make it unusually difficult to predict the future. But thanks to the CDC, we have a problem that is even worse: No only do we not know what is going to happen, but we don't know what is happening.
Accidental? (Score:5, Insightful)
You think it's an accident that these statistics have been confused enough that you can't tell how well the US is doing at detecting and handling current cases - at a time when many vested interests care more about supporting their decisions than basing those decisions on facts?
You really think this is an accident?
Then I have some prime beach land to sell you in Florida. It doesn't even have an outbreak of pandemic coronavirus nearby.
Re: Accidental? (Score:2)
Right, blame it on the non-whites. Where have I heard that before? Oh yeah, George Lincoln Rockwell.
We have the best people (Score:2)
...or so somebody said.
My brother-in-law had a positive antibody test (Score:5, Informative)
So the antibody tests don't just return a positive result for Covid-19 (official name is SARS-CoV-2), they can return a positive result for a variety of coronaviruses. So its dangerous to use the antibody test results as an indicator of how widespread Covid-19 is among the general population [usc.edu].
Based on the antibody test, my BIL got fast-tracked for a regular Covid-19 test, and came back negative. So either the antibody test was erroneous, or it was picking up a different coronavirus infection. (Or he really is infected and the second test was a false negative, but my sister and kids are fine so it's probably accurate.)
Re: (Score:3)
When about 20% of "common cold" cases are caused by a different coronavirus, you have a lot of people have "past infection with non-SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus".
This test sounds like it is useless. Use a highly specific test (such as the one developed by Roche and currently being deployed in the UK health service).
Most positive tests may be false positives (Score:5, Interesting)
Suppose the test is 95% accurate in that only 5% of people who are actually negative get a positive result. If that were the case, about half of the positive tests would be people who are actually negative.
How the heck can that be true, you might ask. How is "95% accurate" only 50%?
Prior probability is why. Suppose 1,000 random people are tested. The test will erroneously say 50 positives for people who are actually negative. Suppose 40 of 1,000 are actually positive. The 95% accurate test will find the 40 true positives and 50 false positives.
Re:My brother-in-law had a positive antibody test (Score:5, Interesting)
This is why test approval usually takes a long time. We're talking about "antibody tests" as if they're all the same thing; in fact there's dozens of of antibody tests that have been rushed to market and they have wildly different levels of sensitivity and selectivity.
I personally would not have an antibody test because of exactly the scenario you describe. In isolation, even a test with good selectivity and sensitivity isn't going to yield any useful information. If your test is positive, and you have no other reason to think you have COVID-19, chances are that it's a false positive.
If, on the other hand, the test is negative, that doesn't mean you don't have it; it's possible you're infected and your immune system hasn't responded yet.
Antibody tests have their uses,but screening random people isn't one of them.
Re: (Score:2)
I've been very concerned about this (although theres potentially a silver lining in this).
Its been well established for a while Coronaviruses seem to display some element of cross reactivity when it comes to antigens
A paper I found a while back on SARS (published 2005 I *think*) found Sars antibodies reacted with the coronavirus-a common-cold type coronaviruses, and it might be inferred that a reaction the other direction might be the case too.
In other words, are we *certain* we've been tracking the right a
Re: (Score:2)
The upside of this: Maybe, just maybe, the humble common cold, well the non-Rhinovirus version, might actually be protective. This *definately* deserves investigation.
Or the other way around: maybe antibodies for one particular HCov common-cold virus lead to a counterproductive immune-system response, which causes older people (with more lifetime exposure to HCovs) to suffer more.
Speculation works both ways...
Re: (Score:2)
My brother-in-law took a Covid-19 antibody test, and it came back positive. Which led to a small panic in our family as my sister and their kids had thus far remained virus-free. Upon reading the fine print [covid19testingkits.org] for the test, I came upon this gem:
FWIW, the manufacturer of that test claims 100% specificity [healgen.com]. Whether that is accurate or not is another question entirely, but that's their claim. They pretty much have to say that, though, because there's always some possibility that they're wrong, and that it will cross-react with some other coronavirus's IgG/IgM.
There's also the possibility that some manufacturing mistake could result in pre-contaminated test kits, though admittedly for an immunochromatographic assay, that's probably not nearly as like
Re: My brother-in-law had a positive antibody test (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
A small nit: SARS-CoV-2 (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome [caused by] CoronaVirus 2, named after the first human coronavirus identified in 2003) is the virus. COVID-19 (COronaVIrus Disease of 2019) is the disease caused by the virus. Both are "official" names, "the official names COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2 were issued by the WHO on 11 Februar [wikipedia.org]
Cover up (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The irony being that if this were a lab created weapon from China, deliberately released to torpedo the US or Trump, we're not only letting it happen, we're helping it spread.
The usual issue with bioweapons like this are that they're impossible to control and as likely to infect the aggressor as the victim, it's a stupid thing to do. But...through sheer incompetence, on an unintentional virus, we're changing that equation. We may actually be a great country to target with bioweapons.
Re: Cover up (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh and they only had 84k cases, total.
Who gives a shit what China says about anything? Care what they do? Yes, absolutely. What they say about anything? Nope, they have a piss poor track record on even the most basic statistics like their GDP so how can we trust them for important things li
Re: Cover up (Score:4, Interesting)
People can point to this evidence and say who gives a shit what America says about anything. Their CDC can't even get its own story straight.
You seem to think America somehow deserves to be trusted without question, yet this kind of thing shows that's far from the case. I mean, even forgetting the old stuff like bullshit intelligence about Iraq WMDs.
Funny how Americans are suddenly so trusting of their own government's data after this debacle.
Re: (Score:2)
As I understand it, China's own testing numbers generally also include antibody tests. For example, when American newspapers ran stories about how they Chinese had already tested several million people in Wuhan and compare this unfavourably to US testing, most of those tests were antibody tests. Though on past form that wouldn't stop China taking these American news articles portraying this as something the US is doing and pointing to them as proof that the US are the ones faking their numbers whilst China
Oh, I know (Score:4, Insightful)
"You've got to be kidding me," Ashish Jha, the K. T. Li Professor of Global Health at Harvard and the director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, told us when we described what the CDC was doing. "How could the CDC make that mistake? This is a mess...." By combining the two types of results, the CDC has made them both "uninterpretable," he said...
The managers at the CDC probably got their MBAs at Harvard Business School, a high government position. So they are capable of managing anything, doing anything, accomplishing anything, including this mistake.
Re: (Score:2)
This is why managers think you can easily train anyone to be a programmer. They only know from their own degree that you can take any kind of chimp and drill the crap into him.
They're the best examples for this.
Re: (Score:2)
"You've got to be kidding me," Ashish Jha, the K. T. Li Professor of Global Health at Harvard and the director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, told us when we described what the CDC was doing. "How could the CDC make that mistake? This is a mess...." By combining the two types of results, the CDC has made them both "uninterpretable," he said...
The managers at the CDC probably got their MBAs at Harvard Business School, a high government position. So they are capable of managing anything, doing anything, accomplishing anything, including this mistake.
I have a friend at the CDC and there are two things to note here: What the CDC puts out is being wrangled so much by the current administration that the rank and file employees (read non political appointees) are not happy with the output. The second thing of note is that Harvard is not very well known or regarded in the field of public health
"Can't trust anything out of the CDC" (Score:3, Insightful)
Apparently Deborah Birx was correct.
Well, when leadership assignments and policy decisions are made with "I want to neuter this government agency as much as possible" primarily in mind, after three plus years no one should be surprised by the results.
CDC is operating in a bureaucratic nightmar3e (Score:4, Insightful)
Most of the people working there are selfless and passionate about their work. But led by a president who is ignorant of risks, who bankrupts his companies with overly optimistic decisions, and who demands personal loyalty over competence, it's unsurprising that their current leader might base his announcements on the "big vision" rather than on medical facts,
Not a cover-up (Score:2)
It's simple: when everything started we didn't have good tests. As things went we started to get better tests and multiple different kinds of tests. What is going on is the CDC is trying to reconciling all the data. If the numbers are out of wack, then have a neutral statistician review the data and come up with real numbers. Maybe things really are getting better?
Re: (Score:2)
Err... mixing up virus and antibody test results is a pretty basic mistake. The tests simply tell you different things. If you combine the numbers together, it becomes harder to draw any conclusions from trends in the numbers, particularly if the proportion of tests varies.
If a number is meaningless, the best statistician in the world can't fix it.
Re: (Score:2)
Revive the CDC (Score:3)
America needs to revive the CDC [thelancet.com] ...
I agree that they shouldn't be conflated (Score:1)
I agree that they shouldn't be conflated, but they should be tracked and counted towards the overall number of tests. Arguably they are no less useful than rt-PCR tests: in both cases you can only stop testing once you have a positive test. Just because your rt-PCR is negative now, doesn't mean it will be negative 6 hours from now. Arguably, seroprevalence tests are _more_ useful in fact, because they routinely show there are a lot more people who had the disease already and didn't even know, and unlike rt-
CDC anti-âoecombo-data pointsâ goes vira (Score:1)
Why is "Centers" in CDC plural? (Score:1)
America's Center for Disease Control "is conflating viral and antibody tests..." writes the Atlantic, "distorting several important metrics and providing the country with an inaccurate picture of the state of the pandemic."
Somewhat OT but I found out recently that CDC is, for some weird reason, correctly styled as plural. For example, despite the plural construction "Centers for Disease Control and Prevention", the Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] uses singular verb, noun and pronoun forms in describing the agency:
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is the leading, national public health institute of the United States. It is a United States federal agency, under the Department of Health and Human Services, and is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia.
Re: (Score:2)
Don't bother (Score:1)
We failed to test when it would have helped. And when we finally got around to it, we're using tests on the wrong people. Really, don't bother testing.
If I sound flippant, let me say we should do testing if important decisions hinged on test results. But there is no decision waiting on test results. It's madness.
Virginia (Score:2)
Virginia was pulling this crap until the Governor, a medical doctor, became aware of it. An official was quoted as saying it was done intentionally to make the numbers look better. These are the people we need to weed out of government.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If you don't have sex, you can't contract HIV through sex. I don't see anything contradictory about this position?
Re:CDC has been gutted (Score:4, Insightful)
Thus any policy that is based on people not having sex is prone to fail.
It's like saying we can increase the quality and reduce wastage by not making errors. Errors will happen. All you can do is reduce the impact of errors.
Re: CDC has been gutted (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:1)
Yeah, and since people are always really rationally thinking and very level headed when their hormones take control, hell, what could go wrong?
Re: (Score:1)
Do we prevent murder by just saying: You shall not kill?
Re: (Score:1)
Yes, we basically do.
Unless you're suggesting we go back to imprisoning adulterers and jailing people who intentionally spread HIV (not even a crime in California anymore). Is that what you're suggesting? Many would be in favor.
If that's not what you're suggesting, then you have no point and Rei_is_a_dumbass thoroughly owned your ass.
Re: CDC has been gutted (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1)
"Murder is not an innate drive."
So how do you explain murders committed by those not trained to murder?
Re: CDC has been gutted (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
It's like saying we can increase the quality and reduce wastage by not making errors.
And the aspies nodded sagely...
Re: (Score:2)
Heck, the guy in charge of the CDC now is a Bible-beater who contributed to books about abstinence as the best way to fight HIV (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_R._Redfield).
If you don't have sex, you can't contract HIV through sex. I don't see anything contradictory about this position?
The BEST way to prevent HIV is different from A way to prevent HIV. You could execute kids before they reach sexual maturity, and that would surely result in a lower incidence of HIV, if that's your only metric.
Re:CDC has been gutted (Score:5, Funny)
And we all know how people in the U.S.A. feel about metric...
Re: CDC has been gutted (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, because we all know that sex is the only way to transmit the disease.
I have to ask: You're a product of the US school system, I guess?
Re: CDC has been gutted (Score:2)
Re: CDC has been gutted (Score:2)
Outside of heroin junkies and the percentage of meth heads who inject it is overwhelmingly the most likely method of transmission.
Re:CDC has been gutted (Score:4, Informative)
Sure, as a hypothetical, wave-a-magic-wand scenario it absolutely works. The question is whether it's effective *policy*.
Re: (Score:3)
No, it's not. It relies on spouses being faithful, for example
Re: (Score:2)
I don't see anything contradictory about this position?
Don't see it?
Maybe [mathematica.org] you [nih.gov] should [newswise.com] try [aphapublications.org] "looking" [nytimes.com] before [sciencedirect.com] you [tandfonline.com] reach [jahonline.org] that [jahonline.org] conclusion [powertodecide.org].
Re: (Score:2)
Heck, the guy in charge of the CDC now is a Bible-beater who contributed to books about abstinence as the best way to fight HIV (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_R._Redfield).
If you don't have sex, you can't contract HIV through sex. I don't see anything contradictory about this position?
On that topic we should also forget about seat-belts, not driving is a very effective way to reduce traffic deaths!
Re: (Score:1)
Who said anything about forgetting about seat belts?
The best way to not die in traffic is to stay off the road.
Driving defensively, driving a modern vehicle, wearing a seat belt, etc. help. They are not the best ways to avoid dying in traffic.
Re: (Score:2)
Who said anything about forgetting about seat belts?
The best way to not die in traffic is to stay off the road.
Driving defensively, driving a modern vehicle, wearing a seat belt, etc. help. They are not the best ways to avoid dying in traffic.
It was an oversimplification to make a point.
Advocating abstinence as a solution to STDs is like advocating not driving (or as you stated not driving) as a solution to traffic deaths instead of seat-belts.
It's advice that while technically true is completely useless because no one will ever follow it and much better practical solutions are available.
Re:CDC has been gutted (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think you're in any way foolish for being distrustful of the CDC, but if you think the WHO is better or doesn't its own set of dummies or ass kissers in the ranks than you're sorely misguided. Both organizations are dropping the ball and if you're blindly putting trust in either of them I have to question your thinking. I also have to question it for other reasons if you think one of them is trustworthy but the other isn't, and frankly it doesn't matter which organization you choose for either basket.
Re: CDC has been gutted (Score:1, Flamebait)
I hope that clears it up.
Re: CDC has been gutted (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
As this clearly wasn't the former; I'd simply take their reaction as a compliment.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:CDC has been gutted (Score:5, Interesting)
The facemask thing was a clusterfuck, but it WAS the position of the epidemiology community, because at that stage the evidence wasn't there yet that facemasks helped. Science doesn't really do "common sense" or "annecdote" or anything like that, it deals solely with data, and at that point the data did not expist that facemasks where a useful thing.
With that said, The WHO was to some extent motivated by political-economic motivations with that pronouncement in that it was trying to protect supplies of PPE , and unfortunately rather than saying "Currently we do not know if facemasks will help in everyday interactions, and we need to keep the stocks available for medical professionals", it just went straight to "It doesnt help". That was a mistake. Likewise on the *evidence* available at the time Sweden WAS probably the most scientifically compliant response, because the approach it took DID in fact work well for Covids precursor, SARS, even if from a point of retrospect it was a disaster.
None of this indicts WHO as a source of data. It just means its hopelessly in need of rethinking when it comes to *policy* recomendations, because one would presume that this would mean a stronger focus on identifying the precautionary approach when dealing with unknowns.
I doubt they'll be making that mistake again in future outbreaks.
I'll ignore the China thing. That appears to be a partisan, and specifically an American partisan thing.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:1)
Wrong. 100 countries right now are demanding an investigation on how the world responded to the virus. This includes the US and EUROPE, which have both done horribly.
Re: CDC has been gutted (Score:1)
https://www.newsweek.com/122-countries-want-investigation-coronavirus-outbreak-happened-china-says-premature-1504712
Re: CDC has been gutted (Score:1)
Which is exactly what I said it says.
Duh. Stupid cowardly AC.
Re: (Score:2)
Whatever spin is being put on the WHO assembly meeting, the declaration that the member states signed says "OP9.10 Initiate, at the earliest appropriate moment, and in consultation with Member States,1 a stepwise process of impartial, independent and comprehensive evaluation, including using existing mechanisms,2 as appropriate, to review experience gained and lessons learned from the WHO-coordinated international health response to COVID-19, including (i) the effectiveness of the mechanisms at
Re: (Score:2)
Re:CDC has been gutted (Score:4, Informative)
The facemask recommendation wasn't a clusterfuck, it was perfectly sensible with what was known at the time. At the time, facemasks were being discussed as a way to prevent people from contracting the virus. For this purpose, they are fairly useless. They don't offer much protection and people tend to touch their face more and by less mindful of their actions because they are wearing a mask and feel "protected". So instead of telling people to wear masks which would have taken them away from first responders and and front line medical workers, people were told not to wear them and instead those with the virus should quarantine. Later when it was discovered a high number of people who have the virus were asymptomatic, the subject of masks was revisited. While they don't do much to prevent people from catching the virus, they are very effective in preventing people from spreading the virus. So the recommendation changed to advising everyone to wear masks because people could be infected but asymptomatic. This is exactly how it should have gone with the information known at the time.
Re: (Score:2)
The facemask recommendation wasn't a clusterfuck, it was perfectly sensible with what was known at the time. At the time, facemasks were being discussed as a way to prevent people from contracting the virus. For this purpose, they are fairly useless. They don't offer much protection and people tend to touch their face more and by less mindful of their actions because they are wearing a mask and feel "protected". So instead of telling people to wear masks which would have taken them away from first responders and and front line medical workers, people were told not to wear them and instead those with the virus should quarantine. Later when it was discovered a high number of people who have the virus were asymptomatic, the subject of masks was revisited. While they don't do much to prevent people from catching the virus, they are very effective in preventing people from spreading the virus. So the recommendation changed to advising everyone to wear masks because people could be infected but asymptomatic. This is exactly how it should have gone with the information known at the time.
I'm in Australia, where face masks aren't recommended, and think the other aspect to the debate is how far spread Covid is in the community. In Australia you are extremely unlikely to interact with someone who has the virus so face masks are unnecessary. If I was in New York it's a completely different situation. I've noticed a lot of people are trying to push the narrative of confusion and conflicting advice so that they can make their own personal opinion appear to be equally valid when the reality is if
Re: (Score:2)
The health department indeed has stuck to the advice that if you dont think you have symptoms there are no advice.
This has not been advice reflected by many of the state health departments, and its no secret the coronavirus responses in Australia have been driven almost entirely by the states (being that its the states are who have constitutional right of way in this matter), although tthe feds approach to income support has been surprisingly smart. Who'
Re: (Score:3)
It was the position of the *western* epidemiology community. In the far east they were telling everyone to wear masks right from the start and believed that they would help. Japanese TV was carrying that advice way back in early January, and I followed it.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
Once again, it comes down to politics.
"I'm going to make a statement that seems objective, but since everything has been devolved to black vs white, left vs right, Trump-Haters vs Trump-Lovers, in fact my statement is just a way of rephrasing that I hate Donald Trump and would do anything to undo the 2016 election."
IOW: Go Team.
So now it's CDC=Trump and WHO=Liberals? Well, WHO was cuddling up to China, so I guess it makes sense, but could we finally go back to the political color-nomenclature of Red = Demo
Re: (Score:1)
Trump decided to blame the WHO for everything that has gone wrong, and he gutted the WHO and filled it with his own people, so yes, CDC=Trump and the WHO while imperfect is at least independent of him.
It's a very bad situation to be in where you can't really trust either of them, but it's one that Trump made deliberately.
They were wrong about face masks (Score:2)
As for the WHO giving into dumbass Chinese gov't intervention if the US had kept our pandemic response team in China and kept up our presence in the WHO and around the globe instead of pushing "America First" politics for the sake of good optics then it would be less of an issue.
When folks talk about the United States abdicating global leadership this is what they mean. We left a power vacuum China is happy to exploit.
Re: (Score:3)
The WHO still doesn't explicitly suggest face masks. ... I don't have any good reason not to trust the WHO.
That's a pretty good reason lol. The scientific evidence is clear by this point.
Re: (Score:1)
You know better than the World Health Organization?
This isn't even unexpected. It isn't the goal of The WHO (or the CDC, for that matter) to get the most cutting edge information out to people. They do have a job, but that's not it.
Re: (Score:3)
"How could the CDC make that mistake?
I don't think they made a mistake. They've been told to get the largest possible figures for testing to show that Something is Being Done, and so they're taking everything that could look like a Covid19 test and adding it to the mix, from NAAT through to "Ethel from accounting has a bit of a sniffle and reckons it's Covid19". Anything to inflate the (apparent) testing numbers.
Re: um, your bias is on a flagpole (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, thereâ(TM)s the *fact* that under redfieldâ(TM)s leadership, the cdc is making a data mistake not worthy of an undergraduate.
Then thereâ(TM)s this via Wikipedia:
> The 1993 investigation did say that Redfield had an "inappropriate" close relationship with the non-governmental group "Americans for a Sound AIDS/HIV Policy" (ASAP), which promoted the gp160 vaccine. The group was founded by evangelical Christians that worked to contain the HIV/AIDS outbreak by advocating for abstinence before marriage, rather than passing out condoms â" a view Redfield says he's since changed.[21][23]
I would like to see some *factual* evidence for you claim that government agency dysfunction in the trump time is due to careerist sabotage rather than trumpâ(TM)s failure to properly fund and appoint capable leadership and staff.
Re: um, your bias is on a flagpole (Score:2)
Ok.
Re: um, your bias is on a flagpole (Score:2)
No, but user tiqui made that claim.
Re: (Score:2)
Like every other government agency, the good people were fired or forced out, and were replaced by some real dummies and/or ass kissers.
Who were forced out?
Re: CDC has been gutted (Score:2)
Are you saying on Trump's first few hours in office he demanded his resignation? Realllly? Lololol
One (Score:2)
So that's one. Whom else? The CDC is a huge organization, it must have been quite a housecleaning to make a significant impact on it's operations.
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
It's really telling that some people modded DogDude's comment "troll". Disagreeing is one thing, but this is pure politics. Trump has decided to blame the WHO for his failures and the real trolls with mod points are trying to help him by censoring anything that doesn't criticise them. There's also the need to defend his gutting of the CDC now that a pandemic has hit.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm in charge of a bunch of people, and when I'm making COVID-19 decisions now, I look to the WHO, instead of the CDC. It sucks, but I simply don't trust the CDC during this administration. Like every other government agency, the good people were fired or forced out, and were replaced by some real dummies and/or ass kissers. Heck, the guy in charge of the CDC now is a Bible-beater who contributed to books about abstinence as the best way to fight HIV (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_R._Redfield). The CDC has been muffled, and slow to act through this whole thing. Very disappointing. But, I'm very glad the WHO is still out there doing good work.
Quoted for visibility against troll censor mods. (It apparently irritates them, too.)
In this case, I only partly agree with your position because WHO has some of the same problems, but just on a global level. I think both WHO and the CDC need to be strengthened against political interference. Does that argue in favor of WHO because the UN is more politically incompetent and therefore less able to interfere with the science?
Research question: Which deserves more credit for stopping the major Ebola outbreak i
Re: Who? (Score:2)
Re: Trump has blood on his hands (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
In looking at your post history, it seems that all you're capable of is posting useless, toxic hyperbole on slashdot. I recommend seeing a therapist so you can work through these issues that drive you to make such infantile, laughable, utterly empty threats. Because a therapist is the only one who's going to be taking you seriously, and only because he or she is being paid to. The rest of us are just going to laugh you off as that snotty little kid in the store who's throwing a tantrum because his mommy isn