While I agree that the Executive has the right to interfere, I don't think the word I'd use for this is "normal" - I would hope that agencies like the CDC and the FDA, which are based on science and have been a world-reference for other similar agencies, should be manned by career scientists that should be allowed to do their jobs in a sheltered manner in terms of being defended against undue political pressure - a bit like the Federal Reserve. Just like the Federal Reserve can't do its job efficiently if politicians try to interfere, the FDA and the CDC also won't perform well if they are subject to a lot of political pressure. The losers in this situation are the American people. So instead of "normal" I'd say "technically allowed by the constitution, but despicable nevertheless." [I'm aware that the Federal Reserve isn't a perfect analogy. All analogies are imperfect otherwise they'd be the real thing rather than an analogy]
As I mentioned before, I suggest looking through work done by the CDC during different administrations and notice the differences. What is studied changes and the way studies are presented changes. If you give the CDC “jobs” outside of contagious diseases, which we have, it’s going to get political. If the CDC still stood for Communicable Disease Center I’d agree with you. But when we task the now monikered Center for Disease Control and Prevention with studying things that have nothing to do with disease (like social issues, swimming pools, and firearms) you force politicalization on the agency. We can’t have our cake and eat it too. Either limit the CDC to communicable diseases and be apolitical or task them with a bunch of political/social “garbage” and have political interference by necessity.
I agree with you. But see, it's the fact that politicians "gave" them these spurious topics that derailed them. So the interference itself that I'm lamenting, is what is causing the issues. Much better would be to have them do the apolitical scientific job, period.
Agreed. Science and politics don’t mix well. And I don’t mean like oil and water, I mean like chlorine bleach and ammonia.
But here we have the White House doing exactly that...in the middle of a pandemic that has killed 200,000 people and counting
You are on record now approving of administrations using the CDC to violate my Second Amendment rights and circumvent my 4th, 5th and 9th Amendment rights. That pretty much eliminates your right to complain about an administration doing what is a Constitutionally allowed function of the Executive branch. Remember as well, you are the one who believes government should be involved in almost every aspect of our lives. You are the one who wants government to care for you and make hard decisions for you. Well, when you build a government like that sometimes you aren’t going to like the results. When I figured all this out, I got the government out of my life as much as possible instead of sitting around whining about things. You all wanted the CDC politicized. Deal with it.
Strange. The Alerts system doesn't seem to be working well. I was never notified that you had quoted me (just looked at my list of alerts again; this post isn't there), and I've tagged you and quoted you before and you didn't seem to have noticed either. I think it's been hit-and-miss lately while before I got notified every time. @Falena is there a software issue that is preventing the notifications from working properly? Lately I've had to use the "watched treads" more often to get to posts of people who replied to me/quoted me, while before the Alerts function was infallible. Anyway, LOL, I like your chlorine bleach and ammonia analogy! To those who don't know it, don't do it, folks! This mix releases chloramine and chlorine gases which can kill ya!
Mostly unnamed sources, again. The information we have been fed by the CDC before and after May, has been exaggerated, sensationalized, and contradictory to many of its own previous conclusions and recommendations from one week to the next. We've seen how "the resistance" has been doing all it could to politicize just about everything in a negative light, to somehow damage Trump. To find out the CDC has been dabbling in it too is no surprise.
The CDC came out with new, new guidelines, that say we cannot be tested unless we show a number of symptoms first, like a moderately high fever. Simply saying you were exposed to a COVID carrier is no longer not even a reason to be tested. Updated CDC guidelines now say people exposed to coronavirus may not need to be tested
Which is the most boneheaded decision known to the entire field of epidemiology. These are the people most important to be tested. These are the ones who, not knowing that they have the illness, will spread it to others by going about their lives. If you test them and they are positive, then they can stay put and avoid spreading it to others. Once you have all the symptoms, testing you helps with establishing your diagnosis but doesn't do much to contain the contagion, since by then you're probably already self-quarantining or already admitted to a hospital. By now it's clear why the CDC wants it this way. I posted here a direct quote, not anonymous, but from one of the CDC officials, saying explicitly that this new guideline came directly from the White House, in the person of Trump's adviser Scott Atlas. So, curtailing this kind of testing does two things: One, allows Trump to boast about declining number of cases (well, yeah, if you don't test the contacts, and the mild and asymptomatic cases, certainly it will LOOK like the cases are dwindling. Two, enables Scott Atlas' boneheaded, ridiculous, dangerous, and clueless strategy that if we let (and even enable) the virus to spread, we'll achieve herd immunity (no, we won't, not before killing hundreds of thousands of people, who would have survived if they had just avoided the contagion for a few more months until the vaccines are available). I posted the direct link to the CDC official specifically naming Scott Atlas as being behind this policy. Here, I found it: https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3386 "All the docs” on the White House coronavirus task force had signed off on the changes ~snip, and a new addition, Scott Atlas" Who said the above? "Brett Giroir, the assistant secretary of health responsible for testing, confirmed on 26 August that the impetus for the change had come from the White House."
Tagging hasn’t been alerting me at all. I’ll have to try and determine if I’ve missed some quotes as well. I’ve never seen an issue with quotation not triggering an alert before, but we’ve seen a lot of new things in 2020 so....
What makes you say that? I don't think Biden subscribes to the school of "Let's not test too many people so that I don't look bad, and so that we get the ridiculously boneheaded and wrong idea of Herd Immunity that my clueless covidiot adviser Scott Atlas keeps pushing for."
I did when I set up my account and I got notifications up to a couple months ago. I checked last night and the tagging feature was OFF so I enabled it. Could be my fault. My phone goes in and out of my pocket hundreds of times a day it seems. I call random contacts by mistake, find strange websites open in Safari, etc. a lot. It’s not inconceivable as much as I use PF intermittently I inadvertently changed settings by accident. LOL. Hopefully it works now...thanks for the reminder though.
It's not you. It's a poltergeist. You have a ghost in your home messing with your electronics. Call Ghostbusters!
Dr. Redfield was on TV today saying that wearing a mask will still be necessary for a long length of time EVEN AFTER THERE IS A VACCINE because even if a vaccine became available today, it would take well over a year before our entire country gets the two necessary vaccinations.
How many died of this, already? And look at a fact checker. I recently consulted one. The Obama Administration response to H1N1 was much more decent than conservatives say. Even if you have a point, the But Obama defense doesn't work for Trump as two wrongs don't make a right.