Let the CDC Go Down with the Ship
We Don't New Guidance, We Need Them to Become Irrelevant
Every day now we see state after state dropping their mask and vaccine mandates, with the biggest remaining battleground being masks mandates in schools. (the lowest risk groups…) Still many of the bluest areas of the country, the most devout followers of “The Science”, just won’t budge until they’re given the all clear from the high priests in Washington. For the most locked down jurisdictions in the country there will be no normalcy until the CDC, the NIH, and Dr. Fauci himself say so.
The leaders of these areas want desperately to change course (they’ve seen the polls), but having married themselves to the “Follow the Science” narrative for two years, they simply don’t have the courage to just admit they were wrong and end the mandates unilaterally. They are begging the CDC to change it’s guidance so that they don’t have to make this difficult choice. You can see this desperation on full display based on the leaked audio of a closed-door congressional hearing with CDC Director Rochelle Walensky.
The House Representatives are practically begging Walensky to change the CDC guidance on masking and end the Covid madness. Walensky equivocates and states that it’s still too soon to change CDC guidance because cases nationwide are still high and she repeatedly reiterated that all schools in the country should still have mask mandates. When the CDC director refers to “high” case rates, she is referencing the CDC’s Level of Community Transmission thresholds where “high” is defined as greater than 100 cases per hundred thousand population recorded over the last seven days. The thresholds gradually decline until you get to “low” which is under 10 cases per 100k per 7 days.
These thresholds were developed very early in the pandemic in the spring of 2020. They have never been updated since to account for higher testing rates or account for the lowered severity and higher transmissibility of newer variants like Omicron. During the Omicron wave the US was reporting Covid tests at a rate 15 times higher than in the Spring of 2020! (and this rate doesn’t account for the massive increase in unreported rapid tests either)
And it’s due to this lack of any updates that even though cases are down over 80% in just the last five weeks…
The CDC still considers nearly the entire US to be at the “High Community Transmission” level. (In fact the US average is still 2.5 times higher than the “high” threshold)
It’s important to understand what this “high” level of community transmission implies. The CDC guidance requires masking in schools regardless of the local level of transmission, but along with higher levels of community transmission come many additional restrictions. The current CDC guidelines for schools would require all “high risk” sports to be cancelled in “high” transmission areas. Essentially the entire county has been in the “high” range since August, as in all school year. This implies that to fully comply with CDC guidelines all high school football, basketball, volleyball, wrestling, etc. as well as band should have cancelled this year across the country!
Is there any state that followed these guidelines? Even the bluest states in the nation allowed contact sports this fall, but to fully comply with the CDC they should have been cancelled, and our kids would have been worse off for it. Even with 100% of the nation eschewing the CDC’s guidance for scholastic activities in high transmission areas they stuck to these rules. Much like with the guidance on masking, even with mountains of evidence from areas which abstained from enforcing their advice showing how ineffective and needless the advice is, the CDC has refused to course correct.
Which is fine. We don’t need them to change anything. If a blue state governor can “defy” the CDC and allow kids to play contact sports in school while cases are “high” they can just as easily defy the CDC on masking or screening testing or anything else.
The fact that the CDC is stubbornly clinging to their flawed guidelines is a good thing.
If the CDC were to change course now it would just give cover to feckless politicians who had the power to unmask our kids the entire time. Did Ron DeSantis wait for the CDC to change their guidance? NO, he actually led, reviewed the data independently, and made sure every kid in Florida had the right to go to school without a mask. He took massive criticism (including from both sides of the political aisle) but it was the right thing to do and that's what leaders should do.
The CDC’s guidelines are just that, guidance, and nothing more. There is no force of law behind them, and no reason any state or locality must follow them. Walensky said it herself, to reported frustration, in the congressional hearing:
“I will also say that guidance is just guidance, and all of these decisions, we've continued to say, have to be made at the local level…”
We don't need the CDC to change anything. We need our politicians and the public to treat CDC Covid guidance with the same weight that we treat CDC guidance regarding everything else!
Take the CDC guidance on food preparation:
If state and local governments backed the CDC’s guidance with the force of law we’d have to…
Did you attend a Super Bowl party this year? Well I hope that, in additional to following all CDC Covid guidance by masking between bites of food, your host also followed the CDC’s Game Day Food Safety Guidance:
Did they serve all hot dishes on hot plates keeping them about 140 degrees? Was the guacamole serving in a chilled bowl to keep it below 40 degrees? And there weren’t any communal bowls of dip, right?… Well if not I hope you called your local heath inspector…
Outside of food prep, there’s plenty of other CDC guidance we’d never dream of allowing the government to mandate.
Or how about the CDC’s Guidance on Zika Virus?
You don’t hear about Zika in the news much these days, but never fear, the CDC is still on the case to guide us through this ongoing menace. The Zika virus can be transmitted sexually, and a Zika infection can be passed to a fetus and cause birth defects. It is for this reason that the CDC has guidance cautioning women against trying to become pregnant if they travel to or live in areas where they may potentially contract Zika.
And the CDC is helpful enough to provide an up to date map of areas with active outbreaks (red) or the risk of potential outbreaks (purple). Any area of which the CDC cautions women that they should consider holding off on getting pregnant. See any issues?
That’s right, currently the CDC is not comfortable giving women the all clear to procreate in the lower 48 states! Even though there hasn’t been a single locally acquired case of Zika in the continental US since 2017!
Should governments put the force of law behind this guidance too?…
None of this is meant to insinuate that much of this guidance isn’t worth following. Plenty of it is sound and will lead one to live a much safer and healthier life. (Ok the Zika guidance is clearly bonkers…) But there are trade-offs, and the CDC sets their guidance based on the highest level of risk aversion which no sane human being would follow. I have no intention of giving up rare steak, I regularly have more than two beers in a sitting, and I ALWAYS sample the cookie dough raw. (another item banned by the CDC…)
The key point is that these guidelines are personal recommendations and should never have been mixed up with government forced compliance. We need to recreate this separation. We need the CDC to get back into their lane, issuing guidance which only the most risk averse members of society pay any heed. We need our politicians to get back in their lane, propagating this guidance not with emergency powers and forceful mandates, but with messaging and community outreach. We need all levels of government to understand that regardless of where the pandemic goes from here, whenever cases rise again, and the CDC recommends more severe measures, this change in guidance should not be mirrored with government mandates.
If we don’t then we will be subjected to the go to measures of masks and vaccine mandates every time there is a spike.
The fact is the mandates didn’t work. Regardless of where you look, be it across the country or across the globe, there is no correlation between the issuance of mask and vaccine mandates and better Covid outcomes. It doesn’t work. The CDC has had two years to study this and has decided to stick with their risk averse yet ineffectual guidance. Fine, let them stick with it, let them blindly ram into the iceberg of reality and go down with the ship, but the public has moved on.
We must make sure every politician who holds power repudiates it, at least when it comes to mandates. Make sure every leader understands that a recommendation from a Federal bureaucracy is not a greenlight for local government mandates. If we are going to return to a normalcy, the possibility of future mandates must be eliminated, and to do that the link between recommendations and mandates must be severed.
As described in the thread above, we must act as Cortes did while exploring the new world when he burned his ships so there was no option to retreat. We must send the mandates out to sea and burn the ships.
Make sure the possibility of mandates is off the table.
Let the CDC and the rest of the purveyors of "The Science" go down with the ship, force every politician to ignore their guidance and remove all their mandates, and let us never let the opinions of bureaucrats rule us again!
Anyway 0 and 2...
The CDC sees the world through one specific lens. It is crazy to me that we have handed over the reigns of society to them... instead of bringing people together from many disciplines to see the problem through many lenses, and come up with a compromise.
What about the children? What about mental health? What about the economy? What about the supply chains? Nope, one lens only. Nothing else matters.