I still believe we’ll eventually return to normal after this pandemic. Yes, there will be people who will continue to wear masks in public or continue to get their COVID-19 boosters on the government-recommended schedule. Still, given how many people have ditched their masks in the wake of the lifted mask mandates, I think most of us want that normalcy to return, and we’ll get it sooner than later.
But the pandemic has exposed some harsh realities about the officials in charge of our government’s response to health crises. Not only are they incompetent, but they are just as prone to political pressure as politicians.
Dr. Fauci, I’m looking at you.
But one agency in particular has seen its credibility shattered during this pandemic, and it seems unlikely that it’ll ever get it back. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC), an agency many likely took for granted as competent and apolitical, has proven itself to be anything but.
For example, this week, the CDC discovered a “mistake” and curiously “revised” pediatric deaths from COVID-19 down 24%. As PJM’s Kevin Downey Jr. noted, “this ‘mistake’ was found well after the CDC’s head honcho, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, used the data to recommend vaccines for kids 5 to 7 years old back in November of 2021. Funny how that worked out.”
Indeed it is.
Statistically speaking, the number of deaths of children under 18 never justified child vaccinations from COVID, but it’s hard not to be suspicious of why the “mistake” was only “discovered” now, after many months of the Biden administration pushing child vaccinations.
But there’s so much more than just the discovery of this “mistake.”
Despite concerns that schools would be COVID superspreaders, back in July, the CDC acknowledged that “multiple studies have shown that transmission within school settings is typically lower than — or at least similar to — levels of community transmission when prevention strategies are in place in schools.” A month later, a CDC study showed no difference in infection rates between schools with and without mask mandates.
This should have ended the debate about masks in school right then and there. But it didn’t. Teachers’ unions lobbied the CDC to keep the mask mandates in schools and successfully did so. Then, a month after the CDC study showed that mask mandates had no impact on COVID transmission rates, the CDC spewed out another study claiming the opposite. The study was utterly bogus, but it gave the CDC cover it needed to justify a recommendation that had no basis in science.
No one wants to believe that the CDC (or any health organization) is more influenced by politics than science, but that is sadly where we are now. Earlier this year, a poll found that only 44% of Americans trust what the CDC says about COVID. While it’s true that party ID plays a significant role in that perception (69% of Democrats trust the CDC, and only 22% of Republicans do), the influence of politics on public health matters seems to be directly connected to the party in power. For example, in 2020, Democrats, led by Joe Biden, destroyed public faith in the COVID vaccines by embracing unfounded anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories.
According to a Morning Consult poll released in September 2020, before any of the vaccines were available, only 51% of Americans said they were willing to take a COVID vaccine—a stunning 21-point drop from five months earlier.
Public health, like any other issue, has become tainted with partisanship. It would be nice to say we need to find a way to insulate public health officials from political influence, but I’m not sure that is possible anymore. Sadly, I find it hard to see a scenario where public trust in the CDC or any other health agency or official will ever be restored.