Waaay back in June 2020, that notorious right-wing rag the New York Times printed a withering article, The C.D.C. Waited ‘Its Entire Existence for This Moment.’ What Went Wrong?. An extended subhead gave the following judgment:
The technology was old, the data poor, the bureaucracy slow, the guidance confusing, the administration not in agreement. The coronavirus shook the world’s premier health agency, creating a loss of confidence and hampering the U.S. response to the crisis.
The article, by Eric Lipton, Abby Goodnough, Michael D. Shear, Megan Twohey, Apoorva Mandavilli, Sheri Fink and Mark Walker, took the agency to task for it numerous errors, even apart from laboring under the burden of a president determined to treat the coronavirus as a PR problem that could be wished away.
Right out of the blocks, the CDC blundered horribly by refusing to use tests for the virus developed by other countries, insisting on developing its own, which proved no better than its competitors, and which, in its initial distribution, proved corrupted by CDC’s own incompetence. As the virus progressed, the agency’s data collection proved abysmal:
As the number of suspected cases — and deaths — mounted, the C.D.C. struggled to record them accurately. The agency rushed to hire extra workers to process incoming emails from hospitals. Still, many officials turned to Johns Hopkins University, which became the primary source for up-to-date counts. Even the White House cited its numbers instead of the C.D.C.’s lagging tallies.
Some staff members were mortified when a Seattle teenager managed to compile coronavirus data faster than the agency itself, creating a website that attracted millions of daily visitors. “If a high schooler can do it, someone at C.D.C. should be able to do it,” said one longtime employee.
“Interesting” that only “some” CDC staff were mortified by the agency’s incompetence, rather than all of them.
In a better world than ours—one that is distressingly easy to imagine, though, it seems, impossible to realize in practice—the CDC might have developed a certain humility about its own competence. But as the virus spread and mutated, both as a disease and as a political issue, the CDC, as personified by Dr. Anthony Fauci, became drunk with both power and delusions of grandeur.
Fauci became the focus of ridiculous, and sadly “typical” political attacks, which unfortunately convinced him that all criticism of him was unfounded. He was “Science”, after all, and Science is never wrong. And, thus, never was he.
His response to the latest blow to his blimp-like ego, the decision of an over-achieving Trumpian district court judge to enjoin the CDC’s insistence on requiring face masks on public transportation, is painful to behold. Reason’s Eric Boehm has Fauci’s supremely wrong-headed response:
For a court to come in and interfere in that [the masking requirement] is really unfortunate. It's unfortunate because it's against public health principles. … that's no place for the courts to do that. This is a CDC decision.
How does Dr. Fauci think the CDC gets its authority to make any decision other than through, you know, “law”? Federal legislation grants the CDC, and through it, the Executive branch, many powers, but the extent of those powers is defined by the federal court system, not CDC fiat. It’s painful to watch a man of “science” with an ego so bloated as to believe that there should be no authority on earth to limit his. A man of science who talks suspiciously like Donald Trump? We live in strange times, strange times indeed.
Afterwords
It’s “amazing”, as in totally gross, to see how the coronavirus has corrupted both left and right. The right fights for the right to get sick and pass sickness on to others, while the left fights for the right of public schools to shut their doors, in all likelihood not only severely damaging the educational careers of the nation’s poorest students, but even dooming public education itself in the nation’s big cities, where kids are, in large numbers, simply not returning to the schools that abandoned them. Reason’s Matt Welch explains how the stunning selfishness of teachers’ unions in cities like Los Angeles and New York are unwittingly engaged in the self-destruction of the educational process in America, while I have a few thoughts of my own.
UPDATE
A new study, Pandemic Schooling Mode and Student Test Scores: Evidence from U.S. School Districts, by Rebecca Jack, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Clare Halloran, Brown University, James Okun, MIT, and Emily Oster, Brown University and NBER, gives the following “abstract”: “We estimate the impact of district-level schooling mode (in-person versus hybrid or virtual learning) in the 2020-21 school year on students’ pass rates on standardized tests in Grades 3–8 across 11 states. Pass rates declined from 2019 to 2021: an average decline of 12.8 percentage points in math and 6.8 in English language arts (ELA). Focusing on within-state, within-commuting zone variation in schooling mode, we estimate districts with full in-person learning had significantly smaller declines in pass rates (13.4 p.p. in math, 8.3 p.p. in ELA). The value to in-person learning was larger for districts with larger populations of Black students.”
