official-ly-yours

[official-ly-yours]

A government that refuses or is unable to help its citizenry during a crisis can always do the next best thing: pretend there is no crisis. The CDC’s apparent belief that the covid virus, like Tinkerbell, can only survive on Tinkerbell’s behalf by our collective belief in it is not just absurd, it borders on evil.

They have effectively ceded their authority on covid to the American public -- which is the exact wrong set of people to leave to their own devices during a pandemic -- by making it a matter of personal responsibility.

This is particularly heinous in the case of health care workers, who are left to fend for themselves during a pandemic of a disease that is spread through the air they breathe; I had a dentist’s office actually tell me I didn’t need to wear a mask if I didn’t want to.

The American public, in general, is not known for doing the smart thing, and they have, en masse, come to regard the wearing of masks and the maintaining of social distancing not as a minor inconvenience to be endured for the general benefit of all, but an assault on their personal liberties. The American individual, it seems, is a self-interested, ill-informed, poorly-raised ass who needs to be protected from his own stupidity, either by the benevolent hand of Big Brother or, in the case of covid, by Big Nature. The CDC has decided that public ignorance -- even when it is lethal -- is in keeping with individual liberties, and that a pandemic will work itself out by natural selection.

The pandemic and the CDC’s response to it have become highly politicized. The CDC seems to have decided it would rather be seen as an ineffectual, neutral force rather than perceived as siding with people or policies that the American public, in a fit of self-righteous, right-wing rage, has vilified.

This is wrong and unethical of the CDC because the one body of people specifically established to prevent and mitigate diseases is now allowing a deadly disease to run rampant because of a vague fear of political blowback.

And the most cynical of all possible explanations: because they are in the pockets of Big Pharmaceutical, and Big Pharma has assured them that a cure is on the near.

The fact that this cure, like the cure for cancer, is always around the corner, is of course irrelevant to Big PHarma, because if the cure arrives, they stop making billions treating the disease with their pills and their shots.

So it's best to keep the cure forever on the horizon, and keep on treating the symptoms and the virus, all the while insisting that only Big Pharma can save you.

And if you don't trust Big Pharma, you are anti-science, and an unworthy citizen; thus, there is never any meaningful debate in the media about treatments or prevention for covid.

t’s a perfect example of the self-defeating nature of a profit-driven medical system: it’s more profitable to treat diseases than to cure them. And even a pandemic that kills more than a million people isn’t enough to get the system to stop treating the disease that killed them and start spending money on what really works: prevention.

If you don't want to wear a mask, and you don't want to get vaccinated, and you don't want to worry about staying home when you're sick, because you “can’t take it no more,” or you have a “right” not to do those things, you should be free to suffer the consequences. Unfortunately the rest of us have to live with your choices.

In that sense, the CDC has handed over not only their authority on covid to the American public, they have also handed over responsibility. They have not only given us a pass to be selfish and irresponsible; they have turned our health into a moral or political matter when they should have stepped in with authority and said, “No, here’s what you have to do, period.”

The CDC should be ashamed but, just as the American media is ashamed and afraid of speaking out about gun control, the CDC is ashamed and afraid to exercise its authority and to be seen to violate our perceived freedoms, even if those freedoms are destructive or deadly.

I realize that the American public would go berzerk at the merest suggestion of a government mandate that everyone wear masks and stay six feet apart, all the time, and have regular testing. And this is not an easy argument. I’m not even suggesting that we do any of these things. I am only saying that we have a government agency specifically created to keep us safe and healthy, which has instead, after three long years of pandemic (we're currently at the 4.5 year mark, by the way), decided to leave us to our own ignorance and devices.

The CDC has betrayed its mandate in order to placate the most paranoid and ill-behaved, the most selfish and irrational people in the land — the kind of people who need to be coerced and directed for their own good, for your good, for the public good. There is no such thing as a benevolent dictatorship, but there should be such a thing as a benevolent public health organization that has a responsibility to the health and life, not to the whims and superstitions of an ignorant and petulant populace.

Their inaction and spinelessness have made this disease last far longer than it should have, making it seem like an unavoidable fact of life, like the common cold or the flu. They might as well be recommending prayer.

They should have treated the pandemic not as a political football, and not like an excuse for the American public to behave childishly, but like a medical threat which required a full-throated response from the top, including draconian mandates. They should have been in the media every night, telling us what is and is not true, and what we must and must not do; they should have been pushing vaccines, testing, masks, and safety regulations, not worrying about what the Fox News audience or the CNN audience might think.

That is their job, isn't it? To stand in the breach and take the heat for making us do what is best for us? Yes, they take some heat for mandating vaccines, and making us wear pieces of cloth in front of our stupid faces -- but how much heat should they have taken for not doing these things?

Because four and a half years in, we are living with the long-term effects of allowing the American public to decide for itself what is best, allowing every state and locale to determine its own rules, and allowing individual businesses to decide whether they care about the safety of their patrons. It is the public health equivalent of the Wild West. And it has, frankly, gotten ridiculous.

We have moved to a life without mask mandates, without lockdowns and, of course, without vaccines, even as the virus mutates into ever more virulent forms and spreads by the hundreds of thousands, killing tens of thousands. People are getting sick and dying and the CDC says, “Ah, well, what can you do? That's life.”

This is an abdication of responsibility, it is cowardice disguised as humility, this is a betrayal of their oath as doctors and as public servants. And it is killing us and making this pandemic almost endless and endless.

As long as the CDC continues to be so ambivalent and weak-willed (or bought out by corporate interests), and the American populace continues to behave like spoiled children, covid will continue to be a plague that we have to live with, that we have to learn to live with. All because the CDC is too cowardly . . . and fearful of losing its authority and its “street cred” to make us do the smart thing: wear masks and get our shots. Three years on, and they still haven't even come up with a national slogan or ad campaign in favor of masks and social distancing. Not even “Mask Up, America.” Because they know it would offend the right-wing and the left-wing, and it would offend the anti-vaxxers and the liberals, and both sides would threaten to pull support, and so we have a public health organization that is too afraid to make a public health appeal — a “Please, do the right thing,” campaign — because it might upset one or two of the warring political factions.

And, of course, because people have become bored with covid and are tired of taking precautions, we have a situation where everyone is doomed to get covid, probably multiple times, and many of us, most of us, will suffer the long-term consequences, because the CDC was to cowardly and politically-compromised to go into the nation and say, “Listen, this is a serious public health problem, and everyone has to help us solve it. You get your shots, you wear your masks, you keep your distance from people, and we can all get through this. But if you don't, there will be serious consequences for you and for everybody. So help us to help you.”

But no, because the CDC has lost interest in public health, and they're happy to see us all suffer the long-term effects, happy to let the disease get worse and worse, and they're happy to blame it on an ignorant and recalcitrant public, all the while avoiding their own culpability.

The CDC is an impotent organization, an ineffectual one, an amoral one.

And yet, they still command the respect of much of the American public, who assume that if there is one organization that is watching out for our health, it is this one. And they have betrayed that trust, not just this pandemic but, with its failure to recognize, in a scientific way, the health risks to gay men from AIDS (which led to thousands of unnecessary deaths in the 1980s).

The CDC has failed us in many ways and failed its own mission time and time again; and yet, it continues to operate as though it is an authoritative voice for our health, and that it is an objective and responsible one. There is nothing objective or responsible about this organization, and it does not deserve our respect. 

And we all know that you cannot be a sociopath when in the public health business, but that is what the CDC has become: completely indifferent to the welfare of an ignorant and frightened public that they should be educating, not ignoring.

Four and a half years into this pandemic, and the CDC still cannot be bothered to issue an official public statement, a campaign to encourage masking and distancing, to encourage shots and boosters and better treatments — even now, they are silent, even now, they have given up.

The long-term consequences are going to hurt us all: the long covid, the damaged immune systems, the thousands of Americans who are losing their cognitive functions, their ability to work, their capacity to remember, their very memories. Our loss of brain tissue — not just our economic loss, but the diminishment of our future — are going to be profound.

Four and a half years of long-term covid-induced cognitive damage (on top of what we were already enduring with Facebook, TikTok, and all of the other brain-numbing “social” media) — we’re all collectively stupider than we were in 2020. That’s the American future: a mindless mass of disabled covid victims and a culture where ignorance not only rules, but can live forever — not just survive — in the vast echo chambers of social media, where the CDC does not venture and where the lies take over what is left of the brains of Americans.

I know that, as an organization, the CDC has no individual sense of responsibility — just a vague idea that they failed to do their jobs. But I hope the CDC knows it is responsible for so many deaths. I know they don’t care, but they should.

Imagine if they thought about that from time to time, as they send out their little memos and advisories, as they refuse to do anything more than the barest of minimums — and as they hide behind their scientists and their politicians — imagine if they thought, sometimes, about the lives they could be saving, not just now but in the future, instead of thinking about their own political and intellectual cowardice.

They’re going to be remembered as fools, sociopaths, and cowards, as ignorant and selfish, as just as irresponsible and dangerous as the people they couldn’t make follow sensible policies. And they will have done it themselves with their spineless inaction and their cowardly inability to lead.

I think I read recently that it is becoming a bit of a joke at the CDC: an employee will email another with “Merry Covid!” They are so detached from the suffering outside their bubble at the CDC — which is, of course, why they have been so cowardly and unfeeling.

If they had any soul, they would be wracked with fear and shame for the deaths that have resulted from their cowardice. And yet they probably tell themselves they did the best they could in a time when we have a divided nation, when half the country is completely ignorant and irrational.

That is how politicians and organizations avoid responsibility for their actions (or inactions): they say, we did the best we could in a very difficult time; it’s not our fault that some of our public cannot cope with science or facts or logic.

We should say this at the end of every news report about the latest number of covid deaths: that thousands of those deaths are preventable, and that the CDC is the organization responsible for minimizing that number. And they are responsible for many other thousands of deaths in the long term, as people suffer from the cognitive and physical impairments caused by long covid.

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