COVID-19: Chapter 6 - ThanksGRAVING

Dude, this has to be blamed almost entirely on Trump. I have midlevel friends in the CDC who have been talking this whole time about the absurd line they have to walk on COVID communications. People up and down the hierarchy were rolling their eyes about the nonsensical and contradictory stuff they were having to put out there. It’s not directly orchestrated by Trump, but like any big organization, when an occasional angry directive comes thundering down from on high, the threat is enough to change everything. Instead of being out in front of everything, they were weakly reacting to new developments after huge internal strife and confusion.

The CDC before COVID was permanently damaged as a result of Trump, but even the diminished apparatus of the organization was fatally hamstrung this whole time.

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CDC head said today we will have 60-90 straight 9/11s starting now

Looks like Covid got Deebo. RIP

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I mean, as if to emphasize this point:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/12/11/trump-stephen-hahn-fda-covid-vaccine/

Literally saying to submit a letter of resignation if the vaccine isn’t approved. That’s one healthy institution.

I feel weird stanning for the CDC or FDA or whatever. Nowadays, in 2020, they are in fact clearly corrupted and diminished institutions. But the idea of these institutions is something that people who want competent government should embrace.

lol CDC isn’t the takeaway here. The takeaway is that an institution like the CDC, FDA, or EPA is extremely fragile, and after (hopefully after) an age of bad-faith control by right wing extremists, they need to be rebuilt and strengthened, not have their purpose undermined even more. Otherwise, we’re just feeding into the right wing talking point that government never works.

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I know I had posted a few times about my friend’s dad who was originally denied admission to the hospital. He died this week. 68 years old. I haven’t seen him in a few years when my friend moved away but in the early 2010s he did not seem like a whacko. I went and looked at his FB today and his last post was October 29th reposting a Trump post. The one with the black guy in the car professing his love for Trump.

Yes Trump is responsible for the deaths of 100k+ easy.

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This is a great post and spot on.

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You actually give a shit about those?

I’m happy to assign infinite blame points to Trump, and his unique combination of utter immorality and complete ineptitude were disastrous. However, I don’t think it’s wise to let the shadow of his blame obscure how disastrous our response was. He’s actually a relatively weak president–one of the reasons he’s constantly complaining about the Deep State is that he does constantly get rolled by everyone around him because he’s dumb. But did Trump order the CDC to fuck up their early tests? Is he insisting now that the CDC emphasize surfaces and not talk about ventilation? Was he the only one pushing an anti-mask message? The answer I think is no to all of those.

If the explanation for all these failures is that the career CS people were doing their job poorly to avoid nastygrams from their bosses, that’s more an indictment of the organization’s culture than a mitigation. By comparison, DOJ has been subjected to a much more sustained and determined effort at subversion, and the career people there are doing quite a bit to gum up the works when they’re pushed to do things that are contrary to their mission. I mean, I can’t think of a single high-profile firing/departure in any of the public health organizations. Compare that to how Barr and Trump got outplayed in the Geoffrey Berman saga.

Part of what makes Trump uniquely bad is that anyone with a clue despises him and the people who love him are all total morons. Inevitably he drives out group a over time and we end up with all group b. The more incompetent you are the more likely you are to end up in Trump’s orbit because it sorts for it. The fact we got to that is Trump’s fault whether he did it directly or not.

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Pretty sure the CDC has consistently said that surfaces aren’t the main way COVID is spread.

Masks clearly work according to many studies. However I’ll never convince any doubters of that since Fauci and the WHO decided to tell people they didn’t work at the start of the pandemic. The charitable excuse, that they believed the world was too dumb to distinguish between n95 and cloth and no nuance in the message would make a difference, was completely stupid. trump deserves the lions share of blame but most people in charge here fucked it.

Some posters here were so impressed by Cuomo they wanted him to replace Biden. Cuomo, the guy who sent patients into nursing homes, doesn’t wear masks at indoor press conferences, yells at reporters for asking simple questions. The dude who already wrote a book about how well he managed things.

Trump was the worst of many elected officials who were completely unprepared. I suspect it has something to do with caring more for rich donors than the whole of humanity

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…is Trump in the wrong here? These are two paragraphs from the WP article:

With the timetable apparently accelerated from Saturday morning, the FDA and Pfizer were rushing to complete the paperwork needed for the authorization, according to another individual who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he didn’t have authority to discuss the plans.

An FDA statement issued early Friday morning said the FDA had informed Pfizer that it would “rapidly work toward finalization and issuance of an emergency use authorization” following Thursday’s endorsement of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine by an agency advisory committee.

If the advisory committee vote was the de facto decision point, then what is the hold-up here? Sure, paperwork, but the paperwork should already be done and waiting for signature once a decision is made. People are dying by the thousands every day. Trump is right to give zero shits about the FDA process and insist that the vaccine be approved immediately if FDA is not continuing to investigate its safety. That kind of leadership is actually a big piece of where Trump has failed. He mostly only fires people for abetting his corruption–it’s actually nice to see him exert some authority on behalf of getting a vaccine out quicker.

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I’m sure the scientists know that perfectly well. But here’s the CDC’s advice on how to host a social event. It has exactly one mention of ventilation (“Host your gathering outdoors, when possible. If this is not feasible, make sure the room or space is well-ventilated (for example, open a window)”), compared to three full sections on surfaces (“Use single-use options or identify one person to serve sharable items, like salad dressings, food containers, and condiments, so that multiple people are not handling the items.” Thanks CDC!)

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North Dakota officially into 5th for deaths per capita today, behind only the 4 NE states hit hardest at the beginning of the pandemic. And they are charging hard and fast to overtake 4th place on this list soon.

Yeah the delay on approval is ridiculous. Although obviously Trump just wants it out asap so he can take credit for it.

The level of nitpicking here is just unreal to me. I’m sorry that they don’t explicitly use the word “ventilation” in the first two sections where they talk about keeping physical distance from people (which is clearly placed in front of the section about hand washing!).

I mean,

COVID-19 spreads less commonly through contact with contaminated surfaces
Respiratory droplets can also land on surfaces and objects. It is possible that a person could get COVID-19 by touching a surface or object that has the virus on it and then touching their own mouth, nose, or eyes.
Spread from touching surfaces is not thought to be a common way that COVID-19 spreads.

seems reasonable to me, but I’m sure you’ll find a reason it’s not framed precisely in the way you prefer.

As an aside, I’m old enough to remember when the experts told us that takeout food was mostly safe because surface contact is less dangerous and people went ballistic.

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Many of the things that government does poorly is because the Rs designed then that way, or at least corrupted the process.

Well they’re tied into my pay so yeah.

How much difference does it make?

Presumably only a small amount of your salary is based on the scores, and the difference between a score that is a bit lower and a bit higher is not that much. Also surveys from a single patient probably won’t move the average that much and I doubt that every patient gets surveyed.

There seems like enough attenuation there that I’d definitely “educate” the dumbest of the offenders. It would probably be worth that small hit. Maybe if you go HAM on every patient that walks in the door, that could be significant.

Look first off, it’s a fucking shitty and pathetic thing to do. Telling someone who is struggling to breathe that they deserve it because they are dumb because you’re mad helps nobody.

Second, you’re making a long set of assumptions that I’m not even sure are true.

I mean I thought it was obvious this was a joke but ya if you’re serious about telling someone who’s worried about dying and struggling to breathe that they’re dumb you’re just a petty asshole

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