Then and Now (The CDC's Enmeshment in Politics)

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Maddy
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Then and Now (The CDC's Enmeshment in Politics)

Post by Maddy » Thu Jul 28, 2022 2:54 pm

Occasionally I'm right. And on the topic of the CDC, I have to say that I pretty much nailed it.

In March 2019--a full year prior to the emergence of CoVid--I opined that the CDC was a fundamentally political agency that could not be trusted to provide a candid or rational response to public health issues. I stated:

"As with virtually every government agency that is no longer accountable to the people (and that is controlled by the same cast of characters that control everything else that matters), we can no longer trust that the CDC's policies have our best interests in mind or that the "facts" with which they deal are not just politically useful fictions. Specifically, we live in an era where radical egalitarianism prevails. To acknowledge that illegal immigrants from third world countries are largely responsible for the resurgence in childhood diseases and that there are other more logical ways of preventing their transmission (i.e., closing the southern border) is all but forbidden if you value your agency job. The more politically expedient path is to begin with the premise that everybody is equally likely to harbor disease and to end with the conclusion that everyone is equally responsible for preventing that by getting shot up--whether or not that actually makes sense. We've seen this song and dance before in a million different forms. For example, anybody who's ever worked around kids knows that socioeconomic factors (more directly, hygiene) is a pretty good predictor of who's going to have lice. But try finding anything but repudiation of that reality in any official public health publication. Same for the Gardasil and Hepatitis C debates. Everyone's equally at risk, or so they say. Unless and until the CDC is willing to call a spade a spade without sticking their finger in the air to see which way the social and political winds are blowing, I remain skeptical of everything they say."

And this:

"If the CDC wants to be regarded as credible, it can't involve itself in the politicization of disease. . . Think back to the AIDS crisis of the '80s when public health officials went out of their way to downplay the obvious causal connection between the disease and certain high-risk sexual practices--and promoting the idea of "safe" high-risk sex instead of coming right out and saying if you do this stuff you've got a good chance of dying. That's just one example. The CDC has been at the center of a number of hotly politicized public health issues, and by all appearances its policies have been swayed by the same influences as other public officials."

And this:

"In the early eighties, when the AIDS epidemic was first getting started, it WAS a disease specific to gays, IV drug users and prostitutes. I was working in a research lab at the time, and a friend from the epidemiology division was talking about this strange new phenomenon known as Kaposi's sarcoma which was being seen with increasing frequency in the male homosexual population. It was not too long after that, after I had gone to work for a company specializing in ELISA technologies, that the discussion came to center around around a retrovirus then known as HTLV-3. If there was any "muzzling" going on, it was the walking on eggshells that accompanied the realization that you couldn't speak frankly about how this disease was being transmitted without being viewed as "homophobic" by the gay lobby and its progressive allies, which at the time were creating quite a ruckus over anything that might remotely suggest that homosexual sex might have consequences. (Anyone remember ACT-UP and its hijacking of official meetings by jumping on top of conference tables and screaming at the top of their lungs?)"

Fast forward to today (skipping over the last two years of CoVid-related deceptions which I trust, at this point, require no elaboration), we get the following among today's news stories: https://www.newsmax.com/platinum/monkey ... d/1080693/

The first paragraph pretty much tells all:

As public health officials work to contain the spread of monkeypox – which has been declared a global health emergency with more than 18,000 cases worldwide – communications experts are slamming the U.S. government's messaging about the outbreak, arguing that it's being driven by identity politics and progressive word policing instead of focusing on science and saving lives.

Not surprisingly, the CDC's policies regarding Monkeypox, the new pandemic du jour, do NOT involve six feet of social distancing or shutting down group events (even "intimate" ones). They do NOT involve shutting down businesses or confining people to their homes. They do NOT involve any apparent curtailment of individual liberties--not even the freedom to engage in some of the most high-risk public health behaviors known to humankind.

I wish I could take pleasure in the fact that for once in my investing career I was right. But all I can feel is disgust.
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Re: Then and Now (The CDC's Enmeshment in Politics)

Post by Mountaineer » Thu Jul 28, 2022 3:19 pm

Maddy, really GREAT to see you here again. I’ve missed you and your perspectives.

…Mountaineer
DNA has its own language (code), and language requires intelligence. There is no known mechanism by which matter can give birth to information, let alone language. It is unreasonable to believe the world could have happened by chance.
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Re: Then and Now (The CDC's Enmeshment in Politics)

Post by I Shrugged » Thu Jul 28, 2022 4:07 pm

It is paywalled but I am sure I get the idea. Yes, you were and are right.

Interestingly enough, whenever I’ve heard a monkey pox story on the local news, they’ve used a standard phrase at the end along the lines of, “… is predominately spread by men having sex with other men.” I’m not sure if I’ve heard it on the national news.
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Re: Then and Now (The CDC's Enmeshment in Politics)

Post by vnatale » Thu Jul 28, 2022 6:37 pm

I Shrugged wrote:
Thu Jul 28, 2022 4:07 pm

It is paywalled but I am sure I get the idea. Yes, you were and are right.

Interestingly enough, whenever I’ve heard a monkey pox story on the local news, they’ve used a standard phrase at the end along the lines of, “… is predominately spread by men having sex with other men.” I’m not sure if I’ve heard it on the national news.


It was stated on one (or two) of this past Sunday's Sunday News shows.
Above provided by: Vinny, who always says: "I only regret that I have but one lap to give to my cats." AND "I'm a more-is-more person."
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Re: Then and Now (The CDC's Enmeshment in Politics)

Post by Maddy » Fri Jul 29, 2022 12:18 pm

So the equally corrupt WHO comes out in today's news urging that gay men--the predominant transmitters of monkeypox--"consider" limiting their sexual partners. Meanwhile, we've got areas of the country where school children are still being kept in masks and entire countries in which people are effectively under medical martial law.

And just to show that they're serious about infection control, Tedros is now recommending that gay men keep "contact information" on their sexual partners--a tacit admission that a large number of gay men have no idea whose rectal vault they've just penetrated.

Kind of makes a joke out of the potential for "droplet transmission," does it not?

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/27/monkeyp ... pread.html

P.S. Hi Mountaineer, good to see you too!
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Re: Then and Now (The CDC's Enmeshment in Politics)

Post by Kbg » Sat Jul 30, 2022 7:00 pm

Nerve hit. Exactly right.

We should all be frightened when politicians try to politicize government agencies...it's really not good for anyone. We want them boring and factual.

Though we should all remember the heads and next layer or two down of most agencies are all political appointees...
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Re: Then and Now (The CDC's Enmeshment in Politics)

Post by Maddy » Fri Aug 05, 2022 4:49 am

After two years of mass hysteria, egged on by public health authorities who declared that businesses had to be sacrificed for the "greater good," who denied emergency medical care to many, who shut church services and funerals, who turned the mere act of grocery shopping into a dystopian nightmare, who required people to be masked (going so far as to suggest that people avoid eye contact), who shut down long-distance travel, who dictated that entire industries be extinguished, who condemned thousands of elderly people to die alone, and who--even now--persist in insisting that the people no longer have the right to move about freely or, for that matter, to decide what will go into their bodies--we get this:
As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention weighs whether to recommend limiting sex partners, health officials in San Francisco, Chicago, New York and other U.S. cities battling surges disproportionately sickening gay men are avoiding calls for sexual restraint, wary of further stigmatizing same-sex intimacy.
. . .
“If people want to have sex, they are going to have sex,” said California state Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), who is involved in the city’s monkeypox response. “I know people who normally go to sex parties who will not. People will make their own decisions about their own risk levels.”
. . .
San Francisco Public Health Officer Susan Philip said the city has learned over decades fighting HIV in coordination with LGBTQ organizations that messages of complete abstinence are ineffective and erode trust within the community.
. . .
In New York City, a top epidemiologist at the health department has publicly criticized agency leadership for not urging men who have sex with men to abstain from anonymous sex for several weeks. Don Weiss, director of surveillance for the agency’s Bureau of Communicable Disease, also blasted the health department for issuing a news release in July advising people who choose to have sex while sick with monkeypox to avoid kissing and to cover their sores; Weiss said taking those steps does not prevent infected people from transmitting the virus.

“This disease is entirely preventable had we the courage to send out prevention messages,” Weiss wrote in a June 22 email. “We seem paralyzed by the fear of stigmatizing this disease while we totally ignore the epidemiology. . .

Weiss, who declined to be interviewed, posted a letter from the agency on his website showing he was reassigned after his criticisms.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2 ... -safe-sex/
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Re: Then and Now (The CDC's Enmeshment in Politics)

Post by boglerdude » Sat Aug 06, 2022 2:21 am

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