I can’t reply to all of this now, but in short, yes, it’s not a single variable scale, and yes, over-reliance on government was on net very harmful to this point. But no, most of the CDC’s influence isn’t legal powers, since the US legal system simply doesn’t work that way. The CDC cannot tell governors what to do, nor can the president—that’s all about their ability to persuade people that they should be listened to, and it’s going to be critical if and when they get their shit together.
I also think several object-level claims in the post are *wildly* off base in several places, in part showing a basic lack of understanding of the issues, and in part claiming retrospectively that they should have know things that no-one knew in advance. It claims The CDC should have approved testing that they weren’t part of the approval process for—no, HHS isn’t the same as CDC, nor is the FDA. It says the CDC needed to respond with tests quicker, but they evidently should have gone slower with distributing lab tests to ensure they didn’t have a false positive problem. The CDC correctly told people that focusing on masks would be a bad idea, because taking focus away from handwashing is really fucking stupid given relative efficacy and scalability of the two.
And your prior assumption that on balance it’s better to attack an institution instead of empowering it is predicated on the claims 1) being true, and 2) directly having a bearing on whether the institution should be trusted. In this case, I’ve noted that 1 is false, and for 2, I don’t think that directly attacking their credibility for admitted missteps is either necessary or helpful in telling the truth.
You’re right that the blocks to testing were largely caused by HHS and the FDA, not the CDC. We described that in the text, but I agree that there’s too large a risk someone skims the headings and misses that. I think it’s important to include because it’s entangled with things the CDC did do, but I’ve edited the heading to be clearer.
I think you’re confusing the CDC with the US government generally in many more places, and have failed to differentiate in ways that are misleading to readers. And as I said, I think you’re both blaming the CDC for things they got right, like discouraging use of already scarce masks by the uninfected public, and wrong to blame the CDC for mistakes that are only clear in retrospect.
I can’t reply to all of this now, but in short, yes, it’s not a single variable scale, and yes, over-reliance on government was on net very harmful to this point. But no, most of the CDC’s influence isn’t legal powers, since the US legal system simply doesn’t work that way. The CDC cannot tell governors what to do, nor can the president—that’s all about their ability to persuade people that they should be listened to, and it’s going to be critical if and when they get their shit together.
I also think several object-level claims in the post are *wildly* off base in several places, in part showing a basic lack of understanding of the issues, and in part claiming retrospectively that they should have know things that no-one knew in advance. It claims The CDC should have approved testing that they weren’t part of the approval process for—no, HHS isn’t the same as CDC, nor is the FDA. It says the CDC needed to respond with tests quicker, but they evidently should have gone slower with distributing lab tests to ensure they didn’t have a false positive problem. The CDC correctly told people that focusing on masks would be a bad idea, because taking focus away from handwashing is really fucking stupid given relative efficacy and scalability of the two.
And your prior assumption that on balance it’s better to attack an institution instead of empowering it is predicated on the claims 1) being true, and 2) directly having a bearing on whether the institution should be trusted. In this case, I’ve noted that 1 is false, and for 2, I don’t think that directly attacking their credibility for admitted missteps is either necessary or helpful in telling the truth.
You’re right that the blocks to testing were largely caused by HHS and the FDA, not the CDC. We described that in the text, but I agree that there’s too large a risk someone skims the headings and misses that. I think it’s important to include because it’s entangled with things the CDC did do, but I’ve edited the heading to be clearer.
I think you’re confusing the CDC with the US government generally in many more places, and have failed to differentiate in ways that are misleading to readers. And as I said, I think you’re both blaming the CDC for things they got right, like discouraging use of already scarce masks by the uninfected public, and wrong to blame the CDC for mistakes that are only clear in retrospect.
Okay, what are those places?