[HN Gopher] CDC cuts expected to decimate Epidemic Intelligence ...
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CDC cuts expected to decimate Epidemic Intelligence Service
Author : anigbrowl
Score : 62 points
Date : 2025-02-14 20:48 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.statnews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.statnews.com)
| jmclnx wrote:
| Just in time for bird flu, by toilet paper and masks now
| esalman wrote:
| He gutted FAA and we got plane crashes. Today I'm hearing nuclear
| oversight folks are being gutted. Time to prepare for one I
| guess.
| advisedwang wrote:
| > He gutted FAA and we got plane crashes
|
| I do believe Trump's attacks on our regulatory agencies is
| going to kill people...
|
| But it does seem implausible that firing the FAA director, an
| advisory committee, and a ATC hiring freeze could result in a
| crash 9 days later.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| I agree, and I don't love the facile takes. It's future
| crashes that could result from fewer resources to investigate
| and analyze these events.
| ivewonyoung wrote:
| Understaffing due to discrimination was a factor.
|
| https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-...
| JustExAWS wrote:
| https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2025/01/30/politics/faa-
| disability-h...
| esalman wrote:
| Love that fact check. People should really take whatever
| Trump, Musk or the right in general say with huge grains of
| salt. That Gaza condom thing being a great example.
| dh2022 wrote:
| The fact check posted by GP and the discriminatory
| practices detailed initial post are about completely
| different things. The initial post details racial
| discriminatory practices started during Obama's
| presidency; the fact check posted by GP is Trump's claim
| about people with mental disabilities working at FAA.
|
| As far as I can tell, GP did not refute the initial post.
| snailmailstare wrote:
| > Understaffing due to discrimination was a factor
|
| I'm baffled by this defense.. Understaffing safety correlates
| with what? The FAA isn't exactly the same as running the
| worlds sleaziest real estate firm or social network.
| tombert wrote:
| Ugh.
|
| It took about two years for the world to more or less return to
| normal when COVID struck. Instead of conservatives learning a
| lesson about that, they instead just declared COVID as fake, lied
| about vaccines, and reelected the demagogue that's partly
| responsible for the virus's wide spread in the US in the first
| place.
|
| Frankly, it's tiring. I don't know why about half the country
| wants this.
| BSOhealth wrote:
| Always remember, only 31% of eligible voters voted for the
| current administration. 69% either disagree, or didn't vote.
|
| If the current administration doesn't prove their value, the
| people will start to have a say in another 2 years at the house
| level.
| tombert wrote:
| We still have at least two more years of this crap. It hasn't
| even been a month and I am already exhausted. I guess that's
| kind of the point, so at least they're doing one thing right.
| bluGill wrote:
| If you didn't vote I count you as agreeing without whatever.
| If you disagree vote. If you don't like the major candidates
| vote for a third party.
| jfengel wrote:
| Of those who didn't vote, why would they choose to vote next
| time?
|
| None of this is a surprise. It's not even like 2016, where
| people could say "I figured he'd be less bad than he said he
| would be" with a straight face.
|
| Whatever excuse they found to not vote for the Democrat in
| 2024, will still apply in 2026 and 2028. Or they'll find a
| new one.
|
| And turnout in midterms is even worse than in Presidential
| years. I don't see those non-voters suddenly taking an
| interest then.
|
| It would be fantastic if somebody learned some lessons. But I
| think 2024 proves pretty definitively that people _don 't_
| learn lessons.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Of those who didn 't vote, why would they choose to vote
| next time?_
|
| My recollection is that non-voters tend to be reliably
| lazy, but I can't find a good source.
|
| The system almost relies on it. If you can identify a non-
| voting bloc, in primaries or ideally even generals, you can
| tax them to give goodies to citizens.
| roenxi wrote:
| If they're smart, when the pendulum next swings and the CDC is
| expanded again then they'll put a lot of effort into a decisive
| yea/neas on what lockdowns and general authoritarianism actually
| achieve in medical outcomes.
|
| RFK Jr didn't make it to where he is right now out of nowhere;
| the medical establishment has suffered a severe blow to their
| credibility because the government used their work in vain. It is
| unfortunate if the consequences do some damage to valuable
| services.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| > decisive yea/neas on what lockdowns and general
| authoritarianism actually achieve in medical outcomes.
|
| Concretely, how do you do this when you don't know much about
| the pathogen?
|
| > the medical establishment has suffered a severe blow to their
| credibility because the government used their work in vain
|
| Eh, I think the propaganda machine did more damage than any
| _actually_ poor decisions.
| taxicabjesus wrote:
| >the medical establishment has suffered a severe blow to their
| credibility because the government used their work in vain.
|
| It doesn't help that the medical system has been gamed to
| concentrate wealth. Doctoring pays well, but doctors are much
| lower on medicine's economic dogpile than insurance and
| pharmaceutical companies.
|
| I think Medicine became an important jobs project in the post-
| NAFTA era because it's an industry that can't be outsourced.
| The amount spent on medicine has gone through the roof, but the
| outcomes are the same as they've ever been.
| AftHurrahWinch wrote:
| I've lived through two major crises as a technical
| professional: Y2K, where I spent thousands of hours updating
| date systems, and COVID-19, where I developed pandemic
| surveillance systems. Something striking connects these
| experiences: In both cases, the people who worked to prevent
| disaster were later accused of overreacting, precisely because
| their preventive efforts succeeded.
|
| When Y2K passed without incident, it wasn't because the threat
| wasn't real - it was because thousands of us worked tirelessly
| behind the scenes to avert it. Similarly with pandemic
| surveillance - the data systems we built helped inform
| decisions that saved lives. Those decisions were often
| described as authoritarian overreach by people who pointed to
| the mortality they averted as evidence.
|
| The irony is painful: The more effectively we prevent a crisis,
| the more people claim there was never a real threat. Those who
| dismiss these efforts as authoritarian overreach are enjoying
| the very safety that our 'overreaction' provided them.
| drawkward wrote:
| The sad irony is that this was said at the begginning of our
| covid response.
| XTXinverseXTY wrote:
| Friedman's thermostat
|
| Analyst visits his lumberjack cousin one Christmas at his
| cabin. Notices the cousin puts an amount of fire in the
| fireplace, which is correlated with the outside temperature,
| while the inside temperature remains constant (uncorrelated
| with firewood or outdoor temperature). Analyst wonders what
| his cousin is wasting all his wood for.
|
| http://bactra.org/weblog/1178.html
| roenxi wrote:
| The thing is if we quiz Friedman's cousin he can justify
| his actions, we can test his beliefs and then deduce that
| he is acting in a reasonable way.
|
| Whereas with COVID we don't have that. Particularly since
| the controls in place were almost all things that people
| could have done voluntarily so the compulsory aspects are
| quite hard to justify. Eg, if a fellow want to live as a
| hermit they can just do that. The government doesn't need
| to shut down big chunks of the economy for them to go into
| seclusion.
|
| And then there were all those vaccine mandates where people
| were just spreading plain misinformation that they would
| have an impact on transmission numbers. Turns out they
| didn't. Without that, the justification for a mandate is
| flimsy even assuming that there is good medical evidence.
|
| The medical establishment should have been championing
| against these measures and, charitably assuming they were,
| they really weren't visible enough in their opposition. I
| can imagine a lot of voters in the US would be asking "why
| do we fund these people?".
| drawkward wrote:
| Bro, if there hadnt been a lockdown, the agitator class that
| seeded groups to rally against lockdowns would have instead
| seeded groups to rally people in favor of what the rest of the
| world was doing at the time.
|
| The right is one giant field of astroturf, paid for by hidden
| billionaires, acted out by bots and the easily duped, and
| disseminated over social media
| ea550ff70a wrote:
| This helps no one. What a disgrace.
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