^^^ does not restore public confidence |
My apologies. I did come off tone deaf and I didn't mean to be unsympathetic for the good scientists being laid off right now. I think, despite best intentions, a lot of damage to institutional trust in public health organizations was done during covid. Bhattacharya's approach is to be transparent, humble, open-minded and willing to support research that isn't usually able to be funded by pharmaceutical companies. If our public dollars can support research that replicates findings and tries to keep politics out of public health, ultimately I think it'll be better for the country as a whole. An authoritative appeal to experts has prompted an enormous backlash |
It is interesting to hear your views and you raise valid points . However, I don’t agree that NIH and CDC research was overly political. It is MAGA who has politicized and demonized objective studies into many important areas that affect all of us such as climate change, medical treatments, vaccinations and epidemiological trends. |
Move fast and break things/ flood the zone. A lot of noise— yesterday Booker, tariffs, and the WI Court race were also huge stories. And the WaPo broke Waltz uses personal Gmail for official business. Hard to get headlines. |
Yeah, just take horse medicine next time you catch a virus. |
That approach and attitude isn't helping public health. What helps encourage people to take good steps is empathy, transparency, quality information. Unless you weld people in their homes a la the Chinese response, public health requires meeting the public where they are.
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Yup...cruelty, chaos, hatred and distractions from far worse. |
We are now so far from that goal, and it will be decades before we can achieve it again. MAHA must go, asap. |
Except that research for anything currently considered “women’s health” is currently political and DEI. |
If ivermectin is such a wonder drug for Africans, why is it so evil for Americans? Ivermectin is low low cost, so the pharmaceutical industry is missing the opportunity to further enrich themselves. |
That’s literally what the NIH has been doing for decades. Many of those people were fired this week. That basic research isn’t just a nozzle you can turn on and off. It’s long and complicated and has dozens of dead ends. It will take a generation to get back to doing exactly what you say you want the NIH to do. |
I believed they tried it with Covid and there was nothing to lead scientists to say it worked, which would have caused a larger study. Why is ivermectin the drug to taut as so great? I think medical doctors would have encouraged its use if it worked. |
This article in the Guardian is what I have been trying to communicate in this thread (and in real time in 2020 and 2021)
Our politicians abdicated their responsibility to make balanced policy decisions due to fear and let the public health considerations around covid completely overwhelm the social cohesion, economic and other health considerations (mental health, cancer screenings). The class based response to covid drove the current rise of populism and lead to citizens deep distrust and lack of support for our research and public health organizations https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/05/covid-policies-lockdown-masks-liberals-book "The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security hosted a wargaming exercise in October 2019, shortly before the pandemic began, to simulate a deadly coronavirus pandemic; the findings explicitly urged that “[t]ravel and trade … be maintained even in the face of a pandemic”. Similarly, a WHO paper in 2019 said that some measures – such as border closures and contact tracing – were “not recommended in any circumstances”. “And yet we did all of that in short order,” Macedo said, “and without people referring back to these plans.” He and Lee also believe there was a strong element of class bias, with a left-leaning “laptop class” that could easily work from home touting anti-Covid measures that were much easier for some Americans to adopt than others. Many relatively affluent Americans became even wealthier during the pandemic, in part due to rising housing values. At the same time, the laptop class was only able to socially isolate at home in part because other people risked exposure to provide groceries. " |
You have literally no understanding of how research works. I agree that Bhattacharya is one of the better possible nominees, but nothing about the cuts at HHS are going to improve research. And what kind of research do you think HHS was doing? precisely the mind of research that is not privately funded. Nothing about the cuts changes the research agenda. Ad for the “authoritative appeal to experts” - I agree that some covid messaging and actions were overboard but I don’t see how you can say this with a straight face when RFK is promoting debunked theories (vaccines cause autism) and quack cures (vitamin A to prevent measles.) |
Does public health require going to a small impoverished country, opportunistically grandstanding and interfering with the public health aparatus of that country to tell them not to get their kids a vaccine you gave your own kids, then running away when their kids start to die of measles? https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/rfk-jr-samoa-measles-vaccine-crisis-rcna187787 |