CDC tracked millions of phones to see if Americans followed lockdown orders

In a world where being the wrong kind of skin colour can consistently get you pulled over and harassed for a 'broken tail light' and 'smelling weed in the car', it takes a lot of social privilege to think that driving around with an unreadable license plate is a workable solution.

I don't think the most perverse behavior we've seen in the CDC has a been a result of political pressure from the executive branch. They seemed to be fairly effective at maneuvering around the Trump administration's attempts to influence their policy. Like most people, at the beginning of the pandemic, I was on the "better safe than sorry" side of things and was generally supportive of their recommendations.

Some of the rules have never made much sense, particularly in regards to masking in restaurants and who was going to have to enforce those rules, but also the insistence on vaccine mandates that filtered down in very logically inconsistent ways to the local level. In an effort to prevent anti-vax conspiracy theorists from having a thread to pull on, they maintained public messaging that was borderline deceitful about the efficacy of the vaccine in preventing reinfection and encouraged ridiculous local regulations like showing vaccine cards to enter establishments. This mirrored the deceitful nature of the "only medical staff need masks" messaging at the beginning of the pandemic to prevent a mask supply shortage.

The turning point for me was Omnicron, as it was very quickly apparent this was a distinct, new disease that had a different risk profile than previous variants. But for what appears to be face-saving measures, no guidance was updated and it took months for them to concede that there were other metrics more important than case counts.

The insistence of continually extending the federal travel mask mandate is a case in point: I don't know of anyone who believes that the loose paper and cloth masks worn by most of the general public (sometimes covering nose and mouth, more often not) are actually producing a substantial effect in reducing transmission in indoor spaces, and AFAIK it's well understood that anyone at high risk of serious infection is well protected with a properly fitted N95 mask, especially in a well ventilated space like an airplane. At no point has there been a focus on educating people on the efficacy of different types of masks, just a continual hammering of the "mask up" narrative, treating people as too stupid to understand the difference.

For what appears to be ass-covering behavior on their part, they have focused on maintaining a consistency of messaging that ignores new data and and discredits any opposing points of view, even from other qualified members of the medical community. They are more focused on projecting authority and consistency than honestly handling nuance and it's become pretty obvious that is not the key to building trusted institutions.

I'm not saying disband the CDC, tear down the building, and exile Fauci. I'm simply saying that we need to recognize that the approach that was taken here did not work correctly and has resulted in less institutional trust than we started with and that we need to learn from our mistakes.

The cat was long already out of the bag at all of those points.

There's a small chance it could have been contained in late 2019 when Wuhan doctors were raising the alarm, but they were silenced and punished by Chinese government officials

In all those cases there was a pre-existing, widespread social bias and open bigotry against the groups being targeted - which of course doesn't make it right, but does explain why such things were tolerated and even thought to be good ideas in those societies. But in most of those cases, I would argue that the intentions of the leadership enacting such policies did not do so out of pure-though-extremely-misguided intentions. They acted in various ways to disenfranchise and disempower (gross understatement in the case of the holocaust!) the groups being targeted, playing to the gallery and entrenching their own power.

As I read the sentiment in the US (as an outsider), I find it hard to believe the CDC are playing to the gallery here. I think there is a genuine intention on the part of the CDC (despite the CDC being a key bogeyman in many flavours of fever-dream). The problem is that the culture of secrecy and "for your own good" in the US is so entrenched (because it's soooo much easier than trying to educate folks), that combined with past mistakes, trust has been irrevocably eroded to the extent that everything is doubted by everyone.

My own view is that this is symptomatic of a huge malaise in the US and to a lesser (but growing) extent in the rest of the world. Can the idea of "society" function in the face of such mistrust in instututions? I doubt it. We are increasingly voluntarily partitioning ourselves into tribes/bantustans and shrinking the circle of trust. To my mind that model doesn't scale well with population. Bad times ahead.

So...it only works for 99% of the population?