Old Wine in New Bottles: CDC's "Overhaul" Involves Lowering the Level of Evidence Required for Policy Making

They are moving in the exact wrong direction. Again. At a greater cost to you and me.

As far as I can tell, after a thorough analysis of statements made by CDC leadership, CDC has everything backwards, still, on their approach to “reform”.

The three mistakes that have always been made by CDC are being repeated, cast as “reform”. It’s old wine in new bottles.

There are three main messages that CDC will focus on, going “forward”. Here they are, paraphrased; they are a recipe for continued disaster:

(1) “We need a consistent message”.

(2) “We can’t make mistakes - in public”.

(3) “We need to rely less on peer-reviewed evidence and be more responsive in real time to crises using what we know, published or not”.

Message #1 is a way to silence dissent. If you’re going “off message”, you’ll confuse the public. By (allegedly) confusing the public, you’re causing harm to public health (and to CDC’s reputation). This is baloney. Reality cannot be estimated by scientific consensus declared by decree.

Dissent and vigorous, healthy debate is precisely at the core of any reasoned process. The people at CDC have not special knowledge, no magically superior ways of knowing no privvy to the rest of the scientific community and increasingly educated public. Message #1 has been used to silence the minority view.

It helps to think about Jeff Goldblum playing a scientist at CDC.

On Number 2, it was telling that CDC Director Rochelle Walensky stated in an interview about the planned “reforms” that, among the worst things CDC did was “make some mistakes in public” and that they need to own that. Own what? The mistakes? or that they made them in public?

“To be frank, we are responsible for some pretty dramatic, pretty public mistakes, from testing to data to communications”.

Testing. Yes, “mistakes” in testing. Such as not using an internal control for each RT-PCR test, turning qRT-PCR into regular old RT-PCR, allowing anyone (including yourself) to use an arbitrary cycle threshold (Ct) to call a virus “present”. And doing mass screening on asymptomatic people, which IPAK research INFORMED YOU would lead to INCREASED false positive rates. (see from 1.31.2021). I sent Rochelle Walensky the IPAK report that proved mathematically that their paradigm would lead to endless sporadic lockdowns due to a number of logic flaws in their overall paradiagn for testing for COVID-19. I describe the full paradigm here (from 2/22/2021). Over two years after sending that report, she finally admits to the flaws.

But she’s not citing her power grab, the one when she presumed to tell all people who owned rentable property that they could not collect rent.

• Regarding Number 3, under the New & Improved CDC, the nuisance of having to base policy on science checked by peer review will be gone altogether. They intend to rely on Preprints more.

What’s new about this? Nothing much. For decades CDC has skirted peer review by publishing whatever they want in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR).

Which makes me wonder if they have been following Federal Regulatory requirements for human subjects research, such as

• obtaining IRB waivers for retrospective studies

• providing informed consent for post-marketing vaccine safety surveillance studies, and

• following the data sharing requirements for federally funded research?

Former CDC Director Robert Redfield went on Fox News and actually said the CDC was underfunded. With $10.7 BILLION dollars in discretionary funding, they are worse than a waste: they are monumental harm, a threat to our health and economic well-being, from which we are just now starting to recover.

We should try #PlanB. Time to #ENDCDC.

I can think of about 100 Senators who might want to hear from you on these issues.