This is a conspiracy theory. An alternative observation is that some very credible critics see failure andrer failure and report on it.
Here’s an article in today’s New York Times just to pluck one of dozens of data points out of the air. To the extent that the amateur game theory, vulgar p-fishing, and playing of telephone that is public health qualifies as a science, it is the most dismal. Rather than communicate the truth about unknowns, or maybe even be curious about the data that they were basing the guidance to mask outdoors on, the CDC scores another own-goal by seemingly misreporting the threat of ourdoor transmission by 3 orders of magnitude.
> Saying that less than 10 percent of Covid transmission occurs outdoors is akin to saying that sharks attack fewer than 20,000 swimmers a year. (The actual worldwide number is around 150.) It’s both true and deceiving.
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> In one study, 95 of 10,926 worldwide instances of transmission are classified as outdoors; all 95 are from Singapore construction sites. In another study, four of 103 instances are classified as outdoors; again, all four are from Singapore construction sites.
> This obviously doesn’t make much sense. It instead appears to be a misunderstanding that resembles the childhood game of telephone, in which a message gets garbled as it passes from one person to the next.
> The Singapore data originally comes from a government database there. That database does not categorize the construction-site cases as outdoor transmission, Yap Wei Qiang, a spokesman for the Ministry of Health, told my colleague Shashank Bengali. “We didn’t classify it according to outdoors or indoors,” Yap said. “It could have been workplace transmission where it happens outdoors at the site, or it could also have happened indoors within the construction site.”
This sort of institutional negligence makes the Challenger o-ring disaster look like a paragon of careful professional judgement. Intelligent reporters with an ounce of capacity for independent thought like Zeynep Tufecki are able to get up to speed on the subject and single-handedly provide better guidance than the entire CDC. An institution that can put out false information and bad guidance with all the attendant psychological, political, and economic costs, where no one lifts their hand to argue against the group think is broken at a deep level.
If I sound frustrated it’s because we do need a credible source of information and the CDC should provide that. Every time they do stuff like this they lose more institutional credibility. Instead we get more conspiracy theories in every direction. Even worse state and local governments make policy based on CDC guidance that mis-measures risk and results in worse spread of the virus. See for instance California’s sudden decision to halt outdoor dining which many have argued caused people to substitute a low risk activity for a higher risk activity (meeting anyway, but indoors at someone’s house) potentially resulting in a surge of cases.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/11/briefing/outdoor-covid-tr...