The CDC is beholden to corporations and lost our trust. We need to start our own | The People’s CDC | The Guardian
▻https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/apr/03/peoples-cdc-covid-guidelines
▻https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/c67201f8766f20632a0d6fa5a6ef7bcdc02dc831/0_73_3000_1800/master/3000.jpg?width=1200&height=630&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&overlay-ali
Released four days before the State of the Union, the new CDC measures and the narrative they created let President Biden claim victory over the virus via sleight of hand: a switch from standard reporting of community transmissions to measures of risk based largely on contentious hospital-based metrics. The previous guidelines called anything over 50 cases per 100,000 people “substantial or high.” Now, they say 200 cases per 100,000 is “low” as long as hospitalizations are also low.
The resulting shift from a red map to a green one reflected no real reduction in transmission risk. It was a resort to rhetoric: an effort to craft a success story that would explain away hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths and the continued threat the virus poses.
The desires of corporate America have been prioritized over the health needs of our people – especially our most vulnerable
These new guidelines are at odds with evidence-based and equitable public health practice in three fundamental ways.
First, they do not intend to prevent disease spread. By minimizing the importance of new cases, and focusing instead on hospitalizations–a lagging indicator–the revamped warning system delays action until surges are well underway and the consequences of severe disease and death are already in motion. Making matters worse, at-home tests are not recorded in the US, so the only “early indicator” in the risk level calculation grossly undercounts the true number of cases.
Thirdly, the guidelines are blatantly political. The new recommendations aim to convince the public that this pandemic is over when it is not. They suggest we tolerate the nearly one million US dead, and too-quickly abandon measures that would keep that number from growing. They suggest we continue to isolate those with chronic illness and disability while the rest return to “normal” life. They suggest Long Covid isn’t the rapidly growing crisis that it is, especially for those fully vaccinated, despite documented risks of ongoing and sometimes disabling symptoms. They dismiss the near-inevitable emergence of new variants. They dismiss the urgency to vaccinate the rest of the world.
Simply changing the metrics gave jurisdictions across the US a false sense of security
Before the new CDC guidelines, the vulnerable were moderately protected by local mask mandates, passing shelter-in-place recommendations, and general support for public health interventions aimed at collective well-being. There was at least some urgency around vaccination campaigns and occupational protections against the virus. There was recognition that Covid was still a threat.
Changing the metrics alone permitted jurisdictions across the US to retire mask mandates and people to retire their masks. As successful health campaigns are interrelated, efforts to vaccinate against Covid and improve ventilation in schools and at work have also lost steam. The shift from red to green reflects both major US parties turning the page on the virus as a political problem rather than a change in the reality of the pandemic. And the red to green shift also paved the way for the political class to wash their hands of would-be fights over Covid funding.
We need a CDC that prioritizes the health of the people, not the health of big business. We need a People’s CDC. And so we formed one.
We’re epidemiologists and physicians, artists and biologists. We’re children, parents, and grandparents. We’re living with Long Covid and losses of loved ones. We’ve come together with a common anger at our government’s disregard for social and public health responsibilities. Though many of us have just met, we inherit hundreds of years of resistance traditions.
We greet this work with humility, recognizing there are still many uncertainties about new variants, Long Covid, and the future of therapeutics. Yet we know enough to reject, with certainty, ineffectual public health policies based on individualistic approaches. And we are certain that there is another way - that collective action has always and can now create a new way forward in responding to Covid and other deadly pathogens.
We’ve already put out a statement and recommendations about BA 2, a statement regarding the CDC’s new recommendations and we brought together a coalition of groups to create an equity-focused toolkit to help parents and teachers demand the best Covid protections in schools. We are in the midst of developing COVID “weather reports” on the state of the pandemic based on epidemiological data rather than what corporate America demands.
The People’s CDC is a collective of public health practitioners, scientists, healthcare workers, educators, advocates and people from all walks of life who care about reducing the harmful impacts of Covid-19. The People’s CDC is volunteer-run and independent of partisan political and corporate interests. A copy of the People’s CDC report on the change in the CDC’s Covid-19 guidelines can be found at peoplescdc.org.
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