Johns Hopkins Dr. Marty Makary’s recent WSJ opinion piece struck a chord with me.
Paraphrasing his basic point:
The CDC has failed in its primary function to deliver data to guide our pandemic response.
Remarkably, the CDC, an agency with 21,000 employees, does not have much of a rapid response team.
Though the CDC is a very large organization, staffed with thousands of trained researchers … it most often just reacts to data from other countries (usually Israel) and regurgitates ad hoc observational studies with questionable scientific rigor (from places like Kentucky and Cape Cod).
Makary asks: Why isn’t the CDC producing (and reporting) the research that policy-makers (and the public) need for decision-making?
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My take: 20 months since the onset of the pandemic, “the science” is far behind the learning curve and hasn’t even developed what consultant’s call a “coherent theory of the case”.
Individual pieces of the puzzle seem to change shape based on the latest research study … from who knows where … done by who knows who.
And, there doesn’t seem to be much thought given to how the pieces fit together.
So, it’s not surprising that the research plan — if there is one — seems haphazard and incomplete.
Save for the near-miraculous vaccine development, we don’t seem to know much more than we did when the pandemic first hit.
And, taking the booster indecisiveness as an example, we don’t even have a clear picture of how the vaccines should be deployed, e.g. Should people with natural immunity be vaccinated? is it better to have more people partially vaccinated or those already vaccinated “boosted”?
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Makary concludes: “The CDC’s failure to report meaningful data has left policy makers and the public flying blind.”
Thankfully, Israel has its act together re: data collection and analysis … so the CDC has something to work with.
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For the record:
> The CDC has 21,000 employees and a $15 billion annual budget.
> It has data on more than 40 million Americans who have tested positive for Covid and 200 million who have been vaccinated.
> The data include the vaccine type, dosing schedule and vaccination date.
But, somebody has to turn the data into actionable information.
The CDC isn’t doing it…
The Homa Files 
September 22, 2021 at 11:36 am |
One stat I’ve been interested to find but to no avail, is the avg and median number of tests administered per person for all people tested, i.e., how common is it that the same person gets tested more than once? Frequent or even weekly tests among our college and employed populations who choose not to get the vaccination happens but to what extent does it happen.