What Did the CDC Retract on their Website?
- fionacsweet
- Sep 22, 2020
- 3 min read
This latest chaos at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention over revised guidance on the spread of the virus is an obvious sign of mixed messages propagated by Trump's administration. We have been kept in the dark for so long due to incompetence and the politicization of this virus, and I am tired of it.
Today marks 200,000 Americans dead of the coronavirus, and Trump is still ignoring the problem. He even awarded himself an "A+" for his leadership during this time on Monday.
Also on Monday, the CDC suddenly reverted back to previous guidance about the transmission of COVID-19, getting rid of previous information about airborne transmission that it had posted only a few days earlier.
Now, other information to think about that may have something to do with this sudden change. This move came less than a week after Trump publicly rebuked the agency's head, Dr. Robert Redfield due to his thoughts that a vaccine would come much later than Trump had initially predicted. Redfield's timeline predicts a vaccine by the second or third quarter next year, while Trump initially was pushing a vaccine to be ready by Election Day.
Do with that information what you want.
Dr. Richard Besser, the former director of the CDC, told CNN's Erin Burnett that the publishing of the new guidance was done in error, but he was also hearing from inside the agency that the problem still had to do with trust. He said this: "I worry about that. I worry about people questioning great science that CDC puts out because they're not sure what's great science and ... what has the fingerprints of politics all over it and that's very, very concerning."
So what was Trump doing during this time period?
Well, he held a rally in Swanton, Ohio on Monday night. To make matters worse, he also made the false claim during this rally that the US had done a better job than Europe when it comes to the pandemic. He even gloated at an apparent second wave of infections that we see sweeping the Atlantic. For some reason, although at the time we were just shy of 200,000 COVID-19 deaths, he said that coronavirus actually only affects few people.
"We now know the disease; we didn't know it. Now we know it -- it affects elderly people with heart problems and other problems. If they have other problems, that's what it really affects. In some states, it affects thousands of people, nobody young. Below the age of 18, like, nobody. They have a strong immune system, who knows. Take your hat off to the young because they have a hell of an immune system."
First of all, I wish that I could just ignore all the obvious issues with those statements and go hang out with all my friends in a big group because our immune systems are just so great. In fact, one of my closest friends is actually really immunocompromised. Even if it were true that all young people aren't affected by the virus, older people are. And young people are in contact with older people. Parents, grandparents, teachers. What Trump doesn't realize is that if the virus affects largely only one group of people, that's still a group of people. People are still dying. Their age doesn't make their deaths any less important.
Trump needs to step aside and make way for real science. A helpful GIF for Trump to follow is right below. (Hint: you can be literally anybody except for Draco.)
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