The truth will out

Opening my email notifications of Substack postings, I see this one from Matt Yglesias.  U.S. Public Health Agencies Aren't ‘Following the Science,’ Officials Say by Marty Makary M.D., M.P.H. and Tracy Beth Høeg M.D., Ph.D.  The subheading is ‘People are getting bad advice and we can’t say anything.’

I am astonished.  It says everything I have been saying since June of 2020.  Our entire public health infrastructure has consistently gone against established protocols, avoided instituting rigorous research to answer key questions, ignored existing and emerging data, has been unbalanced focusing on vaccines rather than treatments, has overreached by mandating policies unsupported by the evidence, and has played definitional games to catastrophize a run of the mill pandemic.  At virtually every juncture the public health enterprises have made the wrong decisions, always in concert with the chattering class, the mainstream media, academia and the State.  

I can't believe Yglesias, an occasionally interesting writer but always in lockstep with the political needs of the Democratic Party, is being so boldly clear about what has happened.  It is an incredible Road to Damascus conversion.

Or not.  Turns out, the Yglesias substack notification was immediately adjacent to a notification from Bari Weiss's Substack, Common Sense.  The usefully enlightening and/or affirming piece by Makary and Høeg  is in Weiss's Common Sense.  And I can easily believe this piece to be from Weiss.  She is definitely of the Left but she is fundamentally an Age of Enlightenment Classical Liberal willing to follow the evidence.  

And the evidence is indeed flowing in, as reflected in this piece from Makary and Høeg.  

The calls and text messages are relentless. On the other end are doctors and scientists at the top levels of the NIH, FDA and CDC. They are variously frustrated, exasperated and alarmed about the direction of the agencies to which they have devoted their careers.

“It's like a horror movie I'm being forced to watch and I can't close my eyes,” one senior FDA official lamented. “People are getting bad advice and we can’t say anything.”

That particular FDA doctor was referring to two recent developments inside the agency. First, how, with no solid clinical data, the agency authorized Covid vaccines for infants and toddlers, including those who already had Covid. And second, the fact that just months before, the FDA bypassed their external experts to authorize booster shots for young children.

That doctor is hardly alone.

At the NIH, doctors and scientists complain to us about low morale and lower staffing: The NIH’s Vaccine Research Center has had many of its senior scientists leave over the last year, including the director, deputy director and chief medical officer. “They have no leadership right now. Suddenly there’s an enormous number of jobs opening up at the highest level positions,” one NIH scientist told us. (The people who spoke to us would only agree to be quoted anonymously, citing fear of professional repercussions.) 

The CDC has experienced a similar exodus. “There’s been a large amount of turnover. Morale is low,” one high level official at the CDC told us. “Things have become so political, so what are we there for?” Another CDC scientist told us: “I used to be proud to tell people I work at the CDC. Now I’m embarrassed.”

Why are they embarrassed? In short, bad science. 

The longer answer: that the heads of their agencies are using weak or flawed data to make critically important public health decisions. That such decisions are being driven by what’s politically palatable to people in Washington or to the Biden administration. And that they have a myopic focus on one virus instead of overall health.

Read the whole thing.  It is a good synopsis of what has been argued by the rational empiricists since at least June 2020.  A worthwhile read.

If, on the other hand, you are more interested in inside baseball arguments from within the confines of Democratic insiders, go on over and read How Hillary Clinton unleashed the Great Awokening by Matthew Yglesias.

I know which read I got more from.  And it wasn't Matt's.