"sweeping reorganization" at CDC to "restore public trust"

that phrase may not mean what they hope you think it does

here’s the face you make when you read this headline:

but then you read the text of the story and realize that it’s just the same people who have been such interminable fonts of incomprehension, disinformation, and outright fraud grabbing even more power and remaking an agency that is already a weapons grade dysfunction junction into one even more able to wreak mischief and menace upon the populace.

CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky met with senior leadership at the agency this morning to lay out her plans for overhauling how the agency works. She plans to remake the culture to help the agency move faster when it responds to a public health crisis. She also wants to make it easier for other parts of the government to work with the CDC, and wants to simplify and streamline the website to get rid of overlapping and contradictory public health guidance.

and expressions change.

sigh.

The changes will be aimed at improving the culture and restoring public trust after the agency's acknowledged missteps in its response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

i mean, come on. pull my other paw, it plays jingle bells.

there is no way that even someone like rochelle walensky could be so out of touch as to presume that the reason that the people have lost faith in CDC is that they “need to be more streamlined to act faster and be better integrated into other parts of government.”

that whopper is not going to pass muster even for the most raddled of “team cognitive dissonance.” they are not even trying to be honest anymore. at the same time they have adjusted their “guidance” to look an awful lot like the great barrington declaration they just spent 2 years disparaging they are claiming that the problem is that they did not have the power and structure to do more aggressive stuff more quickly.

this is just straight up soviet.

this is not an attempt at reform, it’s an attempt at greater institutional capture and encroachment by the same people who brought you “the staggering misstatements and imperial overreach that got us here.”

it’s farce. this is pretext for greater centralization of unaccountable power masquerading as “reform to regain trust.”

make no mistake: there is nothing trustworthy about this.

• The Division Laboratory Sciences and the Office of Science will now report directly to the CDC director, a move aimed at improving accountability of the delivery of timely information

so, the director now gets to tell the labs and the office of science what to do. directly. yeah, hard to see how THAT could be abused.

• A new office of intergovernmental affairs—a hub where states health departments and other federal agencies with interact with CDC

and the agency will then directly foist whatever they concoct onto the states.

• A new equity office, which will increase diversity both in CDC's workforce and add that lens to its public health activities

and, of course, shifting hiring from “competence” to “diversity” always works out well, right? what federal agency has not seen performance gains from that policy?

• The CDC is going to create a new online mechanism for the pre-publication delivery of science

• The agency is going to streamline and simplify its guidance documents and website

so, after 3 years of publishing inaccurate claim after inaccurate claim and studies that crossed well over the line into outright fraud, the solution is to find ways to publish even less well vetted “pre-publication” science and to “simplify” the website to justify providing even less data and to pull down all the evidence of things you got wrong without any pesky questions being asked?

because all that sounds like to me is a way to make sensational claims and prescriptions without having to provide any supporting data.

are we seriously calling that the road to regaining trust?

call me mr cynical paws, but when i read this

The reforms follow a period of review and introspection at the CDC. In April, Walensky announced Jim Macrae, associate administrator for primary health care at the Health Resources and Services Administration, would lead a one-month review of the agency's Covid-19 response efforts. At the same time, she charged three of her deputies to scrutinize operations and recommend strategic changes. Walensky has been meeting with groups of staff in person as employees return to their office after months of remote work.

all i see is “after thorough review, fox commission to reshape henhouse security to be more responsive to vulpine needs.”

and you know damn well what’s going to be for dinner.

and, of course, CNN is utterly thrilled to carry dirty water here and misframe the facts on the ground. but it’s not going to work.

the revisionism in this history is going to fool exactly no one:

The course correction comes after significant stumbles at the agency in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The US had little capacity to test for infection during the early months of the pandemic, largely because the agency released a flawed test to public health laboratories. That kept the nation blind, for months, to the extent of the virus's spread.

The agency has also been criticized throughout the pandemic for issuing public health guidance that some saw as confusing and ineffective.

Many also felt it wasn't moving fast enough to respond.

sorry, but:

this is what they think people are upset about and what lost public health agencies the public trust?

it wasn’t the fraudulent mask studies they published and the reams of made up guidance and guidelines that fell apart faster than knock off ikea furniture from uzbekistan?

it wasn’t pushing lookdowns that were known not to work and explicitly contra-indicated by 100 years of evidence based pandemic study?

it wasn’t claiming that the vaccines would provide herd immunity and become “a dead end for the virus” only to near instantly recant when the jabs failed to work as advertised?

or their total failure to even to the basic rudiments of their job and monitor the VAERS system for danger signals despite the biggest spike of reported vaccine adverse events in human history?

and then quietly erasing vaccine safety claims from their website? (just “streamline and simplify” i guess?)

and manipulating efficacy data and playing “hide the ball” with all cause death and cancer reporting? (see safety claims link above)

this is a classic false framing. you straw man a question no one asked and then answer it as though it resolves an objection in order to sidestep the real points of criticism and blame the victims for being unsatisfied.

but it’s pure farce.

this is like watching the “bukhara gazette” publish a piece in 1221 that claims that the major objection to the mongol conquest was the way they failed to clean up the horse apples the steppe ponies left on the lawn.

after having been so savagely wrong that it initiated, aided, abetted, and justified probably the worst peace time disaster per unit time in US history, they not only want more power:

Walensky also plans to ask Congress to grant the agency new powers, including mandating that jurisdictions share their data.

they are trying to claim that the whole problem was “communication” and “coordination.”

but i think we’re about at the end of the “we’re not fools and liars, you just did not understand what we meant!” gag reel.

this “re-org” is just puppet show pantomime to make happy noises like they “did something” while ratcheting the choke chain of top down dictatorial power tighter, concentrating it in fewer hands, and extending its reach.

if you have any friends who grew up behind the iron curtain or in other such repressive regimes, ask them about this. they’ll give you an earful. (mine certainly have)

if i had a nickel for every time i’ve heard “this is what i fled (insert communist utopia) to get away from,” i’d outbid elon for twitter.

this is real, no joke soviet style government theater.

and it’s hilarious to watch them think that it can work in the age of social media. this didn’t even work in russia where they had total control of media.

everyone learns to read between the lines.

they learn that what you say is always the opposite of what you’re doing.

i mean, jeez guys, at least mix it up a little.

it’s these sorts of shenanigans being streisand effected into the stratosphere that are driving ideas like “dissolve the CDC” into the mainstream and as the overton window shifts, we the people are getting ready to defenestrate rochelle and co through it.

and the more they dissemble and play make believe and try to claim that the problem was just that we did not understand how right they were, the more clear this becomes.

this is a path of self-immolation. it’s is an entire technocratic edifice imploding. and every new speed wobble is greater than the last.

their credibility is in tatters and every new “remedy” makes it worse. it’s surprisingly hard to lie your way out of being thought a liar.

they think they are setting up the power structures for the next outrage but the alternative outcome is that they are digging the hole in which they will be buried.

which way that ball bounces is up to us.

choose well.