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jfengel · 5 months ago
Of course. But it will likely be years before it really reaches its full effect.

There is herd immunity for a lot of vaccines. It might be decades before we have to break out an iron lung. Once we do we'll have to get a whole bunch because polio is extremely transmissible, but until then it will be easily deniable.

Similarly, without tracking a lot of diseases, it'll just be anecdotal. We already hear about E. coli and salmonella outbreaks. Will anyone really notice the difference if there are twice as many? (Especially if it's only reported in the much-reviled "mainstream media".)

The danger is obvious to anyone who knows anything at all about how disease processes work. But as Kennedy said, "We, you know, people, we need to stop trusting the experts." Anybody who knows anything is ipso facto untrustworthy, and you should believe the opposite of what they say. So it will be quite a long time before people have sufficiently "done their own research" (by dying).

nostrademons · 5 months ago
Also many vaccines are given in childhood, the vaccine schedule is frontloaded to the first 18 months of life, and many parents are trying to push to get the rest of their kids' vaccines early if possible for fear of losing access to them. So kids up through roughly 2024 births will have largely gotten their vaccines before the CDC can substantively change anything. We're looking at decades before the health effects become apparent, enough time for kids to be born after the unavailability of vaccines and yet grow old enough to get into school settings where diseases can easily spread.

Also likely to be extremely socioeconomically divided, as wealthy parents will likely be able to secure vaccines for their kids through vaccine tourism or the black market, while diseases run rampant through the lower classes.

aredox · 5 months ago
>So it will be quite a long time before people have sufficiently "done their own research" (by dying).

And even then, it may not be enough. Antivaccine is as old as vaccines, with the same arguments forever, and I would argue that the mass adoption of vaccination in the 20th century has as much to do with social and cultural forces such as post-war optimism, fascination with science and trust in modernity, as with hard data like "efficacy" and having your kids escape illness.

dh2022 · 5 months ago
It looks like US will not be at the fore front of vaccine development and production.

I hope at least this US admin will not ban importing vaccines developed by other countries… they may tariff them, but not ban.

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RcouF1uZ4gsC · 5 months ago
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aredox · 5 months ago
A) The lab leak hypothesis is still unproven. There is no hard scientific data to support it, and many supposed proofs ("Chinese scientists fell ill first") are circular references without proof.

B) Pseudoscientific grifters such as RFJ jr are far far less credible than the CDC, and yet here we are. He specifically said COVID-19 was a genetically engineered bioweapon that targets Black and white people but spared Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.

C) Do your own research and look at "The relativity of Wrong" recently submitted on this website.

dehrmann · 5 months ago
The lab leak theory is plausible. That's enough to not label it a conspiracy theory. It also meant there was never broader discourse on if gain of function research is a good idea.
felixgallo · 5 months ago
The CDC did not 'brand the lab-leak hypothesis a conspiracy theory'. The CDC stated the scientific truth, which was that we didn't have enough to go on at the time to make a judgement one way or another. The initial lab-leak hypothesis was primarily created by Trump & the MAGA folks to try to deflect blame onto China. It could still be valid and correct, but it was definitely not motivated from facts at first, and to my understanding we still don't have enough facts to assert it confidently one way or the other.
philipallstar · 5 months ago
If the two options are a) coming from a wet market vs b) coming from a coronavirus gain of function laboratory in Wuhan that's funded by the CDC, you have to start thinking about this more than just MAGA conspiracy theories.

It's the most bloody obvious explanation, and in a sane world where "MAGA" didn't just turn off everyone's brain cells and cause them to blindly repeat what they're told, any alternative would need some serious heft to be convincing.

os2warpman · 5 months ago
Who, SPECIFICALLY PLEASE, at the CDC "branded the lab-leak hypothesis a conspiracy theory and quickly dismissed it"?

Not the press, not some rando on twitter, not some anonymous and probably made up "source", not "people are saying"-- which actual CDC employee or appointee did this?

I keep asking, and people keep making up bullshit.

LegionMammal978 · 5 months ago
Fauci was relatively quick to dismiss the idea of the virus being human-modified, in a press briefing on April 17, 2020 [0]:

> Q Mr. President, I wanted to ask Dr. Fauci: Could you address these suggestions or concerns that this virus was somehow manmade, possibly came out of a laboratory in China?

> THE PRESIDENT: Want to go?

> Q You studied this virus. What are the prospects of that?

> DR. FAUCI: There was a study recently that we can make available to you, where a group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists looked at the sequences there and the sequences in bats as they evolve. And the mutations that it took to get to the point where it is now is totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.

(The study he refers to is "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2" [1], published March 17.) It seems that much was made of this particular remark. It doesn't rule out the idea of an unmodified virus leaked from the lab, but the widespread theories have always been aimed at the gain-of-function research occuring there.

[0] https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/re...

[1] https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-020-0820-9

nradov · 5 months ago
NIH officials involved in writing a paper in 2020 about the origin of SARS-CoV-2 actively suppressed consideration of a lab leak hypothesis and exaggerated the evidence for a natural origin. Some of their communications have been released and others involved have testified to that under oath.

https://theintercept.com/2023/01/19/covid-origin-nih-emails/

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/03/08/trumps-cdc-director...

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triceratops · 5 months ago
> Remember how they branded the lab-leak hypothesis a conspiracy

Who gives a shit if they did? (and from looking at the comments below it seems like they actually didn't)

Does knowing it came from a lab help you not get Covid? It's called the Centers for Disease Control, not the Pandemic Origin Investigation Bureau.

aredox · 5 months ago
With these rabid haters, COVID-19 is at the same time "just a flu that doesn't hurt kids nor adults and can be cured with a cheap widely available medicine" and “a genetically engineered bioweapon that targets Black and white people but spared Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people” (as explained by RFK jr, now in charge of the CDC).
dh2022 · 5 months ago
These actions helped diminish the trust people had in CDC. So it made it a lot easier to fire these CDC executives.
delichon · 5 months ago
It was Lancet that called it a conspiracy theory.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7159294/

tim333 · 5 months ago
Ironically the one major player to come out and say it probably was a lab leak was the head of the CDC at the time, Robert Redfield.

It was Fauci's lot who tried to do a cover up.

Redfield's telling of the tale is quite interesting if you are in to that sort of thing https://youtu.be/oMlhvnMpRU0?t=119

lazyeye · 5 months ago
60% of the US population has at least one chronic disease. 60 PERCENT!

40% has 2 or more. In any other sector would this be an acceptable outcome?

https://www.cdc.gov/chronic-disease/about/index.html

The old establishment health bureacracy should not be taken seriously. By any measure they are corrupt and incompetent fools.

toomuchtodo · 5 months ago
You’re blaming the medical establishment for Western disease? Maybe blame a car centric, carbohydrate rich ultra processed food incentivized system? Read the risk factors on the page you cited. It’s smoking, alcohol consumption, poor diet, and lack of exercise. Everyone gets cancer when we live longer and improve detection.

Prescribe and subsidize exercise and GLP-1s, ban cigarettes, and you solve a lot of this. The medical establishment did not make the system humans exist in the US in, they simply try to treat it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diseases_of_affluence

tim333 · 5 months ago
You can't really do that, but life expectancy in the US is a fair bit lower than comparably wealthy countries. I'm not sure you can blame the CDC but something is not ideal.

I think it's 84 years in Italy, 79.3 in the US. I'm sure a lot of that is due to healthier diets and less obesity, but isn't that the sort of thing RFK is trying to encourage?

add-sub-mul-div · 5 months ago
With demagoguery you start with there needing to be a party that's "corrupt and incompetent fools" and then apply that to the party you don't like. What are you doing, earnestly trying to understand the problem or something?
lazyeye · 5 months ago
Yes this would be their primary challenge at which they have comprehensively failed.
triceratops · 5 months ago
To paraphrase Dwight Schrute, did the CDC force people to not exercise and eat butter and sugar for 30 years?

What about the role of companies that develop and manufacture and market all this delicious, poisonous food?

gigatree · 5 months ago
The fact that you mentioned butter and not synthetic dyes, glyphosate, seed oils, or literally anything else is part of the problem (ie corporate capture).
owenversteeg · 5 months ago
I completely agree. On any other issue this would be considered a catastrophic failure beyond failure. This is an op-ed from a series of old army generals who lost the war because they were in bed with the enemy every step of the way. The CDC, FDA, and other regulators have a revolving door open to the same industries that profit from the demise of public health.

Take, for example, myopia in children (which has grown from zero to nearly half of children today) or vitamin D deficiency (34.5% of Americans _sufficient_!) The cost is colossal - both myopia and vitamin D deficiency have huge knock-on effects. The intervention in this case is easy and free. And yet, because there is no profit to be made, approximately nothing was done. This is a completely insane state of affairs.

shadowgovt · 5 months ago
I think you've identified the symptom but misidentified the cause. The CDC can identify issues and provide recommendation and guidance.

Implementation and enforcement are federal and state legislative responsibilities. The CDC has known vitamin D deficiency is an issue for awhile; why aren't we handing out vitamin D tablets at school? Hint: it would cost money and at least one party has no new taxes as a pretty consistent plank.

aredox · 5 months ago
You want the nanny state to tell you what to do?

How many of you American are following the CDC's guidelines? Can you follow them without the nanny state enforcing them on you?

Look at Trump congratulating himself for the return of gas cooking - a known cause of inside air pollution. Freedom!

lazyeye · 5 months ago
Agreed. The crazy thing is that the Silicon Valley ethos has always been about disruption, challenging the status quo. Yet when it comes to the utterly abysmal state of public here they all are reflexively rushing to defend the indefensible.
aredox · 5 months ago
Yes, this is the cost of "freedom". Do you want the nanny state to come and tell you smoking is bad, eat less meat, walk more, drink less sugar, don't sell guns and put "This product contains a chemical known to the State of California to cause cancer" labels everywhere?

You red-blooded Americans hate all of these things and then you discover you have chronic disease? Take responsibility for you own footgunning for once, instead of blaming the Deep State, a corrupt CDC, or immigrants or anyone but you.

UncleMeat · 5 months ago
When people live longer they develop more chronic conditions. And our view of health widens, so stuff that was previously just “Bob has bad knees” becomes a chronic condition.

I assure you that banning vaccines isn’t going to fix people’s back pain.

spondylosaurus · 5 months ago
Many chronic conditions are also "chronic" now but just two or three generations ago were either a swift or slow and painful death sentence. We see more adults with <insert major health problem here> because now they actually survive into adulthood and can reasonably participate in society rather than being confined to their homes (or to a home).
lazyeye · 5 months ago
1 in 3 adolescents has pre-diabetes.

https://diabetes.org/about-diabetes/prediabetes/adolescents-...

It's mystery to me why people rush to defend such extreme levels of failure.