[conspire] Trustworthiness, top-down corruption, and the CDC

[Rick Moen]

I promised to get back to:

> Fortunately, our own Federal watchdogs are the gold standard, right?
> Right?  Um, _right_?  Hold that thought.
> 
> More to come about the Toddler Administration's systematic attacks on
> the credibility and effectiveness of our public health agencies.
> Particularly damaged by these criminals is the CDC, whose many decades
> of world credibility have pretty much been destroyed for fundamentally
> stupid reasons -- rather like the Federal Aviation Administration before
> it.

Last year in the ongoing saga of the Administration of The Best People,
the Toddler-in-Chief's toady in charge of the FAA, Daniel K. Elwell.  so
badly sabotaged the FAA's response to the Boeing 737 Max crisis --
refusing to even consider grounding the 737 MAX fleet even as every
other major nation's aviation agency did so, even Canada's -- that 
_now_, nobody takes the FAA's word on airworthiness any more.

FAA's hand was essentially forced by Transports Canada's decree on March
13, 2019, since a large portion of even _domestic US_ 737 MAX flights
would need to cross Canadian airspace (because of Great Circle routing)
and now could no longer do so.  Only _then_ did FAA issue a grounding
order, doing The Right Thing only when forced.  The world's other
air-travel safety agencies duly took notice, and politely let FAA know
it'd better do a joint investigation and recertification project with
other major nations, because -- lesson learned -- nobody was prepared to
trust their word any more.

Sixty-one years of world credibility, shot like _that_.


For seventy-four years, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
(CDC) has been the leading public health institute in the whole world,
an essential bulwark of disease control, vital to the economy, terrorism
preparedness, and many other things.  It would be a terrible thing if we
could no longer reliably trust CDC guidance.

Welcome to 2020.

It was already obvious in February that the Toddler's Administration
wouldn't be telling the truth about the disease, but we can always rely
on the CDC, right?  Whoops, it's been slowly trickling out that the
writing and editing of CDC's guidance texts had been taken over by the
White House coronavirus task force, and been "dropped into" the CDC
Web site by officials in the Department of Health and Human Services
(HHS) over the objections of CDC scientists.  A July document on "The
importance of reopening schools" was also placed on the CDC Web site by
HHS rather than CDC scientists.

More and more interference has come to light over time, e.g., in April
the White House released its own "Opening Up America" blueprint, but
there was an odd silence from the CDC.  It turned out later that CDC had
a vastly different, more specific, and more competent set of
recommendations for lifting lockdown restrictions, but they had been
ordered supressed by the White House.  

At the time of the massive virus outbreak in meat-packing plants in the
midlands, reporters noticed that, the day after the Toddler's Dept. of
Agriculture head permitted the meat companies to write their own new
health regulations, Toddler-appointed CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield 
ordered the watering down of CDC guidance to the meat-packing plants,
neutering the previously ordered infection precautions with qualifiers
like "if feasible".

People started noticing that recommendations for COVID-19 testing of
those who'd come down with patients had disappeared from the CDC Web
site and been replaced with wishy-washy wording suggesting that people
need not be tested if they don't have symptoms (which is crazy and
wrong).  This progressive corruption of CDC's public information got
widespread notice, and -- as with the FAA -- other public health
authorities began backing away from relying on CDC's willingness and
ability to tell the truth.  E.g., in a press conference, California Gov.
Gavin Newsom was asked about new, dramatically watered-down CDC
guidelines, and whether California would rely on them.  Gov. Newsom
said no, sadly, California would have to rely on scientifically valid
assessments.

It was shocking to hear him say that, and even more shocking to
contemplate it being true.

I have no proper end to this depressing story, except to say that I
doubt the damage is all done.  One of the lessons of the Toddler era is
that things can always get worse.