I agree that a lot of aspects of the early response have been less than ideal. And I’m seriously worried about the CDC being affected by the White House’s explicitly stated goal of under-reacting to the pandemic.
With that said, I think it’s important to keep in mind just how important trust in public health institutions will be for the next year.
There already is an enormous amount of misinformation out there competing for people’s attention today. Even if mistakes have been made, the CDC is still far more reliable than the White House and many other loud sources, so we seriously don’t want to reduce the CDC’s share of information being acted on by the public.
In 2009, a *lot* of people initially expressed that they would want a vaccine shot when available, only to refuse it when it ultimately hit the market out of (unfounded) concerns about vaccine safety. [1]
Just imagine how horrible it will be if people don’t trust a licensed SARS-COV-2 vaccine once we finally have it. Trust in the CDC will be an important part of avoiding that.
For these reasons, I urge people to consider the info-hazards associated with discourse surrounding the CDC’s credibility. This is not meant as an all-things-considered judgment that you shouldn’t critique the CDC but be mindful of this risk.
Even if the claim was usually true on longer time scales, I doubt that pointing out an organisations mistakes and not entirely truthful statements usually increases the trust in them on the short time scales that might be most important here. Reforming organizations and rebuilding trust usually takes time.
Important in these considerations is also the meta level issues that arise when dealing with appeals to consequences. There are also other considerations. For instance, if the fact that the cdc has made mistakes is never disseminated, then it becomes harder to hold it accountable for those mistakes and ensure that they don’t happen again.
The degree of correspondence between the Quinn character I made up (thinking it might be a strawman) and some commentators in this thread is quite high.
“Publicizing numbers on PADP effectiveness is bad even if they’re right” → “Publicizing info about CDC trustworthiness is bad even if it’s right”
“People giving money to PADP is good so you shouldn’t undermine trust in them” → “People trusting the CDC is good so you shouldn’t undermine trust in them”
“The people at PADP are nice and honest even if they reported wrong numbers” → “The CDC people are doing good work and people should trust them even though they’ve screwed up here”
I agree that a lot of aspects of the early response have been less than ideal. And I’m seriously worried about the CDC being affected by the White House’s explicitly stated goal of under-reacting to the pandemic.
With that said, I think it’s important to keep in mind just how important trust in public health institutions will be for the next year.
There already is an enormous amount of misinformation out there competing for people’s attention today. Even if mistakes have been made, the CDC is still far more reliable than the White House and many other loud sources, so we seriously don’t want to reduce the CDC’s share of information being acted on by the public.
In 2009, a *lot* of people initially expressed that they would want a vaccine shot when available, only to refuse it when it ultimately hit the market out of (unfounded) concerns about vaccine safety. [1]
Just imagine how horrible it will be if people don’t trust a licensed SARS-COV-2 vaccine once we finally have it. Trust in the CDC will be an important part of avoiding that.
For these reasons, I urge people to consider the info-hazards associated with discourse surrounding the CDC’s credibility. This is not meant as an all-things-considered judgment that you shouldn’t critique the CDC but be mindful of this risk.
[1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmp1005102
Yes, it’s important that the public should trust authorities. Pushing authorities to be more truthful helps, not harms, that goal.
Even if the claim was usually true on longer time scales, I doubt that pointing out an organisations mistakes and not entirely truthful statements usually increases the trust in them on the short time scales that might be most important here. Reforming organizations and rebuilding trust usually takes time.
Important in these considerations is also the meta level issues that arise when dealing with appeals to consequences. There are also other considerations. For instance, if the fact that the cdc has made mistakes is never disseminated, then it becomes harder to hold it accountable for those mistakes and ensure that they don’t happen again.
The degree of correspondence between the Quinn character I made up (thinking it might be a strawman) and some commentators in this thread is quite high.
“Publicizing numbers on PADP effectiveness is bad even if they’re right” → “Publicizing info about CDC trustworthiness is bad even if it’s right”
“People giving money to PADP is good so you shouldn’t undermine trust in them” → “People trusting the CDC is good so you shouldn’t undermine trust in them”
“The people at PADP are nice and honest even if they reported wrong numbers” → “The CDC people are doing good work and people should trust them even though they’ve screwed up here”
Responses to the general argument that trust in the CDC is good and diminishing it is bad have centered around this previous comment.
If you think other institutions are worse, I’d encourage you to write up parallel posts detailing why.