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CDC team studying East Palestine train derailment fell ill during investigation

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Re: CDC team studying East Palestine train derailment fell ill during investigation

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... except CDC scientists have a reputation independent of the political machine. They have more to lose being branded liars than to gain toeing party lines.

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Honestly, the way the public acted during COVID is half the reason I default to trusting the CDC.

It's a far sight better than trusting the voices that tried to replace the CDC with their own "expertise."

Re: CDC team studying East Palestine train derailment fell ill during investigation

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly why, if anything, the CDC is incentivized to overstate the risk. Credibility is their stock in trade.

Why didnt CDC report the symptoms of their own employees?

Is it interesting or relevant? I have similar symptoms right now; it's called "what you get when you have a cold."

No causality, nothing to report.

Re: CDC team studying East Palestine train derailment fell ill during investigation

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, now that I know what you mean: Yes, the CDC said masks don't prevent the spread of the virus. They also said it mitigates the spread of the virus, which are both true statements when the number of people wearing masks grows to "most of the country." Medicine is a statistical science, which a lot of people have a hard time wrapping their heads around the nuances of.

I'm not renewiltord, who actually talked about public health officials not the CDC, unless he edited that part of his post. Hardly makes a difference though. CDC advice in March 2020 was that the vast majority don't need to wear one. Then suddenly everyone had to wear one, on pain of fines. Nothing about masks or the virus or "the science" changed. The reliability problem remains.

> Nothing about masks or the virus or "the science" changed.

Are you sure? Because I'm pretty sure they refined the transmission model after understanding the virus better, looked at the cost / benefit ratios on mitigation options, and concluded that masks were better than nothing given that quarantining everyone wasn't an option.

In that sense, "the science changed" in that we understood the situation better. There is also, of course, the gap between policy and science; the science can say X is true, whether we do Y in response to X being true is a cost / benefit calculus, and that calculus was changing continuously as policymakers updated economic impact estimates and saw how people responded to different approaches.

Re: CDC team studying East Palestine train derailment fell ill during investigation

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's wild that you're being downvoted for true facts, sourced by NPR. The CDC also knowingly advised against masks, for months, claiming that they wouldn't help and could even hurt despite knowing better. And that wasn't the only time they kept quiet with information that would have benefited Americans - this well sourced article points out a few of the more egregious incidents. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/…

Completely genuine question here. Have masks actually been shown to help or not help? We must have learned something about it during all this.

There is just no chance that an n95 being worn even somewhat properly wouldn't significantly reduce your chance of catching COVID or any airborne, respiratory virus.

My anecdotal experience, and I think it matches with lots of other people, is that I never caught covid for most of the pandemic while wearing an n95 and even travelled and was out in public quite a bit. It wasn't until after I and most other people stopped wearing a mask in public that I caught it. It could have been due to virus mutation or whatever, but I had quite a few close calls where I was around infected people but wearing a mask and did not catch it. I also have a large extended family, so lots of people caught it and there was always a homegrown investigation on where they got it. Every single time, there was always some maskless gathering a week or two before where multiple people became infected or a family member that brought it home.

Re: CDC team studying East Palestine train derailment fell ill during investigation

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And cleared to return? These people got sick doing door to door surveys, meaning people were back at home. This is ridiculous. Even with the above, they are “unsure” if it was related to anything else like “fatigue”. Like come on.

The CDC is awful secretive for a public organization working on public health. Sigh.

I get where they are coming from. The pundits and the public at large are not very good at digesting nuanced data. Just look at how much conspiracy the open VAERS database has fueled.

Re: CDC team studying East Palestine train derailment fell ill during investigation

#166
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's deeply concerning to me that democratic party insiders are still acting like Pete Buttigieg could be a future presidential nominee after his horrible handling of this disaster. Further horrifying to think that some of these people may rationalize minimizing and hiding evidence of harm from this disaster because they believe it would serve their political goals.

I am fairly certain most mainstream Americans of any political leaning rolls their eyes when Pete makes a statement on TV. He has had quite the number of mishaps to be commenting on, and I think people are beginning to expect that there will be more under his watch.

I don't disagree, but am pretty cynical about the DNCs willingness to change course based on mainstream American opinions

80% of Dems support universal healthcare, but the lobbyists who control the party kept it out of the 2020 platform.

Biden was losing the nomination until the party whipped the other candidates to endorse him so he wouldnt be polling worse than Bernie

Re: CDC team studying East Palestine train derailment fell ill during investigation

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CDC's handling of COVID was also just a complete and utter joke. Frankly, one big reason why COVID was so bad in the US was because of how terribly the CDC fucked up testing. They banned every test that wasn't their flawed one. NPR did a good article on how massive the fuck up was - https://www.npr.org/2020/11/06/929078678/cdc-report-official...

It's wild that you're being downvoted for true facts, sourced by NPR. The CDC also knowingly advised against masks, for months, claiming that they wouldn't help and could even hurt despite knowing better. And that wasn't the only time they kept quiet with information that would have benefited Americans - this well sourced article points out a few of the more egregious incidents. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/…

IIRC, they advised against masks because (1) they didn’t know it was airborne and (2) there was a huge PPE shortage and discouraging a run on PPE would allow more to go to healthcare professionals. In the beginning there was a ton of investigation on how big of droplets the virus could subsist in (we were all wiping down packages) and it wasn’t clear how the virus was transmitted. As they got more actionable information, they revised their guidance. Not saying they were perfect but there was some fog of war during the spring of 2020 that can’t be dismissed.

Re: CDC team studying East Palestine train derailment fell ill during investigation

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's wild that you're being downvoted for true facts, sourced by NPR. The CDC also knowingly advised against masks, for months, claiming that they wouldn't help and could even hurt despite knowing better. And that wasn't the only time they kept quiet with information that would have benefited Americans - this well sourced article points out a few of the more egregious incidents. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/…

IIRC, they advised against masks because (1) they didn’t know it was airborne and (2) there was a huge PPE shortage and discouraging a run on PPE would allow more to go to healthcare professionals. In the beginning there was a ton of investigation on how big of droplets the virus could subsist in (we were all wiping down packages) and it wasn’t clear how the virus was transmitted. As they got more actionable informat…

The coventional wisdom in epidemiology that diseases can be separated into those spread by aerosols and those spread by droplets. This turns out to be complete nonsense based on a single flawed decades old study claiming particles larger than 5 microns can't stay in the air for an extended period of time, when the actual limit is orders of magnitudes higher. The failure of the public health establishment to realize this reflects long-standing issues the field has with appreciating research done by experts in other fields. Aerosol scientists knew all this, and tried to tell them.

Luckily the CDC has admitted it's mistake, though they haven't properly updated guidance accordingly.

https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwu...

Re: CDC team studying East Palestine train derailment fell ill during investigation

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's wild that you're being downvoted for true facts, sourced by NPR. The CDC also knowingly advised against masks, for months, claiming that they wouldn't help and could even hurt despite knowing better. And that wasn't the only time they kept quiet with information that would have benefited Americans - this well sourced article points out a few of the more egregious incidents. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/…

IIRC, they advised against masks because (1) they didn’t know it was airborne and (2) there was a huge PPE shortage and discouraging a run on PPE would allow more to go to healthcare professionals. In the beginning there was a ton of investigation on how big of droplets the virus could subsist in (we were all wiping down packages) and it wasn’t clear how the virus was transmitted. As they got more actionable informat…

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Re: CDC team studying East Palestine train derailment fell ill during investigation

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely genuine question here. Have masks actually been shown to help or not help? We must have learned something about it during all this.

This study from the CDC website indicates masks have benefits, with increased benefits from certain types of masks - N95 masks seem to be the most effective. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7106e1.htm Yes, I know, the irony!

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