Right! They are doing no better with the monkeypox outbreak.
agree, the problems are mostly structural.
The federal government in general and CDC in particular are not built for speed. The CDC has 11,000+ employees, most are careerists. The researchers do excellent work, but their guiding light (or fear?) is to never have another thalidomide (approve for morning sickness only to find out its linked to birth defects). Therefore, the CDC lives by the gold standard, double-blind studies, all of which take years. It is not in their DNA to make decisions on partial information.
Nothing wrong with improving communications, but their issue is that they donât know what to communicate. Add in pressures from interested stakeholders (unions, business, political leaders)âŠ
âSome public health officials have been reluctant to acknowledge that the virus is mostly spreading among gay and bisexual men, out of fear of stigmatizing this group.â
Before monkey pox, one of the leading causes of hospitalization for covid is obesity, but IMO âpublic health officials were reluctant to acknowledgeâŠâ
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Fortunately, Thalidomide was never approved for use in the US, although it was in Europe.
CDC needs to adapt to also being a public health agency able to respond to public health emergencies, and to weigh the costs/benefits of measures likely to be implemented, and how likely implementation is. Not everything should be measured against a gold standard. Getting the public to do one rapid test 5 days after covid symptoms might not be as good as 3 tests, but is much more likely to occur.
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In addition to roycroftmomâs post, FDA approves drugs not CDC. FDA governs and guides clinical trials for drugs, not CDC. (CDC was involved in covid vaccine approvals as we have seen, and they manage/distribute certain biological agents and drugs).
Agreed communication has been terrible. Hopefully the re-org will help, we shall see. That is not going to change the pressures, from political leaders, et alâŠthis is really the crux of the issue IMO.
ETA: Adding this article re: Thalidomide history. Note thalidomide is on the market now, tightly controlled, approved for certain indications in 1998.
https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-thalidomide-fda/fact-check-fda-did-not-approve-thalidomide-for-pregnant-women-in-1950s-or-1960s-idUSL1N2PY2F7
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Given the intense opposition by many to taking any measures (including lower cost ones, or ones which also benefit the one doing them) to help protect others from COVID-19, it is no surprise that the state of public health in the US is the way it is.
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Perhaps the CDC actions contributed to that reluctance. CDC has admitted its communications were not always candid and forthcoming. That breeds mistrust.
Only 5% of eligible toddlers( under age 5) are now vaxxed. Apparently a lot of parents are mistrustful, sadly.
Per CDC, we are doing great vaxxing those over 65 (95%) and those between 50-64 (just under 94%). Younger adults and their children are the issue.
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Dr, Ashish Jha, White House Coordinator, former Dean of Brown Medical School (yesterday on nbc news):
âour government agencies werenât designed to respond to a once-in-a-century crisis like this.â
Dr. Redfield, former CDC director: âmany in the Agency believed that teh most effective communication was publishing a peer-reviewed paper in a major journal.â
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Maybe they need to be. Other countries managed it
Or, they see no/little need for their toddler.
âPer CDC, we are doing great vaxxing those over 65 (95%) and those between 50-64 (just under 94%)â
perhaps, bcos these groups have a need.
At least, that is what the science says: older peeps are at great risk, little ones not-so-much.
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There was an effort to build a pandemic response guide, but it was abandoned.
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It isnt necessarily just for a pandemic. It could be for a terror attack, or some other catastrophe. Somehow other countries manage to respond quickly and competently in case of crisis, even without a bureaucratic guide.
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To me some of the issues are that our country has a lot of wants but there have to be priorities because of funding.
There had to be choices made.
The new funding bill is a perfect example. There were lots of things that were funded but lots that werenât
Maybe we could just borrow and copy the pandemic response plan of, say, Israel or Germany or Canada. They managed. Even the military has a response plan. We could put them in charge of future vaccinations.
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No wonder so many people arenât that concerned about COVIDâŠ.not so bad if you get infected but donât have symptoms.
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Asymptomatic infections were common even in the early days (ancestral virus, no vaccines). However, getting infected was a lottery â do you get nothing (asymptomatic infection), a small prize (fever and cough), a bigger prize (visit to the hospital), an even bigger prize (bad case of long COVID), or the biggest prize (death)?
Vaccination with current vaccines stopped the ancestral virus, but evolution selected for variants that evade immunity from vaccination or previous infection. However, the risk of the bigger prizes in the lottery is lower (but not zero) after vaccination.
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My takeaways from this study were 1. I can understand the sometimes uphill battle to convince people of the benefits of vaccines (just tonight I saw an ad saying you might have had an easy first case but you can be reinfected and could get a worse case, or organ damage, long COVID, infect a more vulnerable person etcâŠso get vaccinated), and 2. Testing should be more widespread than it currently is if we care about tracking actual infection rates and waves.
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Unfortunately, the US never had effective precautionary testing. The US focused on PCR testing which is too expensive and too slow to give results for frequent precautionary use (e.g. just before an event). By the time home antigen tests were mailed out, too many people had given up.
You forgot to add that home tests kinda defeats the idea of reporting and tracking. (and no, self-reported anecdotes does not tracking make)
Iâm honestly wondering if Covid helped me out, not the disease directly, but my immune system combatting it.
For quite some time (over a year), Iâve had pain in my neck that medical lad said would be either thyroid related or lymph node related - either were more possible than the average public given my history of radiation for the brain tumor. On any given day I could touch my neck and it would hurt, sometimes worse than others. I mentioned it at my doctorâs appointment back in Jan, but since thyroid numbers were good in a March blood test, nothing was ever done.
In late June with Covid that area truly ached for a few days and I was determined to get it looked at more in depth once I was over Covid.
But since the pain went away? Nada. No pain at all in the area.
Either my bodyâs reaction to Covid also got rid of whatever else was causing the pain, or, perhaps it stretched the lymph nodes so much it deadened the nerves around them? Iâm purely guessing. Either way, itâs really nice and for once, in a long time, I actually feel relatively ânormal.â I wish it had also gotten rid of the trigeminal nerve issues, but getting rid of something definitely helps me feel better.
Anyone else have a âplusâ (medically) to having had Covid? I canât see any way at all that the two are unrelated. I just donât know the specifics of how it helped, or if it really helped (beyond removing the pain) or just deadened the nerves.
Otherwise, yes, if oneâs only experience is with mild (meaning not hospitalized) or no symptoms, then Covid is no big deal. The sad/angering part of it is when those folks tell everyone else itâs no big deal, because some of us have lost people we love over it and not all of them âwere going to die soonâ anyway.
Before getting Covid itâs a lottery.
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