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Allie587's avatar

Totally agree with VP’s comments here. Unfortunately, doing abysmal science is not new for the CDC.

I worked for the US Dept of Health and Human Services for years - in a different agency, not the CDC, but working closely with them. I was shocked at the complete lack of scientific rigor I saw.

To give one example: They had kicked off a study that they were touting as a “definitive study” on a particular topic. I emailed a fairly high level CDC rep involved with the study to request their data collection plan. She replied, “What do you mean by data collection plan?” I swear, this is verbatim.

After I explained to this senior CDC scientist what a data collection plan was, I learned that - they didn’t have one. They had enrolled numerous clinical sites into the study, and were going to take “whatever data the clinics gave them.” No attention to the fact that the data from different clinics might not be combinable because the data elements were defined differently, and no attention to the many other considerations a careful scientist would attend to in developing a rigorous data plan.

But, my impression was that they already knew what outcome they wanted from the study, and knew that they were going to massage the data so as to produce that outcome. So why be rigorous about collecting it, as it wasn’t a real study anyway?

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Dr. K's avatar

Everything the CDC has put out for years has been political claptrap to support some agenda. DeSantis said it best when they recently formed a legitimate science panel to review the CDC's generally wrong pronouncements: "The CDC is not serving a useful function; it's really serving to advance narratives rather than do evidence-based medicine."

(If you want to see more CDC corruption, this one about defensive gun use, then try this report well backed with receipts: https://twitchy.com/sarahd-313035/2022/12/15/damning-report-by-stephen-gutowski-reveals-how-cdc-ditched-vital-data-and-bent-over-for-gun-grabbers/)

Vinay is correct -- almost nothing the CDC does would get through a sixth grade science fair (I have judged several). Nor should it get through any kind of peer review except that CDC NEVER peer reviews their stuff (wonder why?) and that ridiculous article about traffic deaths from failing to take a spikeshot did get through peer review. So maybe Vinay is right...perhaps there is no hope.

Or, as Vinay and I and others do, repeatedly pointing out at every possible time that almost everything people are being instructed to do (masking, antisocial distancing, quarantining, spikeshotting) is virtually useless will eventually make a dent. I have to hope so...I have wasted an awful lot of words on it all.

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