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CDC director calls for agency to be restructured following botched response to COVID-19 pandemic [1]
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Date: 2022-08-18
Just this week, the CDC issued yet another set of guidelines for how to deal with those exposed to or those who had contracted COVID-19. Not only are these recommendations written in a way that makes them roughly as easy to interpret and follow as the IKEA instructions for a living room set, the introduction of what appears to be drastically reduced guidelines, at a time when the agency’s own data tracker shows 400 people a day dying from COVID-19, and total cases topping 93 million has driven many local health officials—and school officials—to despair.
It all feeds into the public perception of an agency that is opaque, contradictory, and utterly obtuse. The kind of thing that turned “The CDC recommends...” into a Twitter meme.
In her email, which was obtained by The New York Times, Walensky seems to recognize the scope of the agency's past and present failures.
“To be frank, we are responsible for some pretty dramatic, pretty public mistakes,” she says in a video distributed across the agency, “from testing to data to communications.” Yes, that pretty much covers it.
Calling this a “watershed moment” for the agency, Walensky declared that the agency will reorganize around three goals:
Responding faster to emergencies and disease outbreaks
Providing information that can be used by ordinary people along with state and local officials
Meeting general public health needs
All of that is absolutely necessary, but they are also pretty broad and vague goals. How this is implemented is critical, and no part may be more critical than in updating how the agency’s findings are relayed to the public. Not only is the current guidance difficult for many to interpret, it doesn’t provide the kind of definitive clarity necessary for school districts—many of which are beginning the fall semester right now—to operate in the face of aggressive parents who have been repeatedly sent the false message that kids are either immune to COVID-19 or can’t spread it to others.
That visible area of the CDC is, of course, the tip of the iceberg in an agency that has enormous responsibilities in every aspect of public health. But if those visible actions lack clarity and efficacy, it really doesn’t matter how the rest of the agency runs. Because the job of the CDC isn’t to understand threats to public health, it’s to inform both the public and the government on how to react to those threats.
Getting these reforms in place is likely to take years. But putting consistent, capable resources—not just people with experience in the science, but those with a solid background in public communication—behind the COVID-19 guidelines is something that should happen now.
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[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/8/18/2117435/-CDC-director-calls-for-agency-to-be-restructured-following-botched-reaction-to-COVID-19-pandemic
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