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
Right. Also:
This argument cuts both ways. “Herd immunity” is also not some magically threshold, after which *no one* gets infected. There’s a term for it: overshoot.
From this piece by Carl Bergstrom and Natalie Dean, professors of biology and biostatistics: “Once enough immunity has been built in the population, each person will infect fewer than one other person, so a new epidemic cannot start afresh. But an epidemic that is already underway will continue to spread. If 100,000 people are infectious at the peak and they each infect 0.9 people, that’s still 90,000 new infections, and more after that. A runaway train doesn’t stop the instant the track begins to slope uphill, and a rapidly spreading virus doesn’t stop right when herd immunity is attained.
If the pandemic went uncontrolled in the United States, it could continue for months after herd immunity was reached, infecting many more millions in the process.
By the time the epidemic ended, a very large proportion of the population would have been infected — far above our expected herd immunity threshold of around two-thirds. These additional infections are what epidemiologists refer to as “overshoot.””