Rotten in Denmark: The Centers for Disease Control stopped Recommending
Testing and Tracing
JOHN BUELL
08/31/2020
1SHARES
Southwest Harbor, Maine (Special to Informed Comment) - Centers for Disease
Control guidelines on testing in the midst of the Covid19 pandemic have once
again become a subject of attention and controversy. CNN summarizes the
change: "The CDC, changing its Covid-19 testing guidelines, no longer
recommends testing for most people without symptoms, even if they've been in
close contact with someone known to have the virus. Many doctors are puzzled
by the agency's change.
Some doctors and infectious disease experts were more than puzzled; they
were angry. One factor that makes this disease so dangerous is its capacity
for asymptomatic spread. Perhaps as many as 40 percent of those infected
show no symptoms. To get a handle on how and where the virus is spreading
requires testing.
The current need for testing does not entail the conclusion that new
discoveries or other forms of evidence might at some point becomes more
appropriate or accurate. But there is no claim of a fundamental paradigm
shift here. In response to criticisms it has received CDC now says
individual states and physicians still have the right to make own choices.
Nonetheless, this concession fails to address one of the greatest
deficiencies of the whole Covid19 response, the lack of coordination and
collaboration from the top.
CDC, by promoting advice that goes contrary to what many of its own experts
advocate, is not only throwing fuel on the virus fire, it is lso further
damaging its own reputation and undermining the practice and ethos of public
health.
This recent CDC stance is political in two senses. Trump wants less testing
because it will show him in a more favorable light. This may not be CDC
intent bu and Trump may have played no role in this decision though that
seems unlikely. At the very least CDC officials should surely have realized
this would be the public perception. It is hard for many not to reach that
conclusion, especially given the failure to discuss this change in advance.
Future CDC efforts to foster widespread vaccination acceptance may suffer
from a credibility gap for which the CDC itself is partially responsible.
The Wall Street Journal reports::" Health officials are already fighting to
overcome vaccine hesitancy and persuade the wary to get immunized against
the coronavirus, as candidate inoculations move closer to approval."
The longer term consequences of the CDC inept if not corrupt handling of
this testing may be more significant. If the statistics regarding the death
of our fellow citizens in a war against a pandemic are easily and often
crudely manipulated and weaponized for immediate advantage perhaps there is
no such thing as a common good that constitutes and is constituted by
democracy. Perhaps as Mrs. Thatcher put it, there is no such thing as
society. This painful realization discourages and delegitimizes efforts by
health and social justice advocates to curb the abuses of unlimited markets.
I prefer a different vision, eloquently expressed by Bonnie Honig.
"The democratic experiment involves living cheek by jowl with others,
sharing classrooms, roads, and buses, paying for them together, complaining
about them together, and sometimes even praising and enjoying them together,
as picnickers will do on a sunny afternoon in Central Park. But the
neoliberal corrective absolves us of this necessity and responsibility. One
of the many sad ironies here is that Central Park-landscape architecture's
ode to the power of democratic beauty-is just a stone's throw away from
where barricades encircled Trump Tower from January to June."
http://bostonreview.net/politics/bonnie-honig-president%E2%80%99s-house-empt
y
Ultimately unless we can demand recommendations untainted by political and
economic pressures whatever remains of the CDC is likely to have only grim
news to report.