CLASH POLL: The CDC Spread A Blatant Lie About COVID Transmission — Should Social Media Censor Them For It?
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If a sitting President can be shut down, and if legitimate studies that challenge conventional wisdom (even if they say true things) can be shut down for ‘misinformation’ … what about CDC?
Are all instances of ‘disinformation’ considered equal?
Or does social media single out the ones that disrupt the power-brokers and the panic porn for special treatment?
We have it from no less an ‘authority’ than the New York Times that CDC manipulated the numbers for just how likely the CCP’s gift from Wuhan is to spread outdoors?
When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new guidelines last month for mask wearing, it announced that “less than 10 percent” of Covid-19 transmission was occurring outdoors. Media organizations repeated the statistic, and it quickly became a standard description of the frequency of outdoor transmission.
But the number is almost certainly misleading.
It appears to be based partly on a misclassification of some Covid transmission that actually took place in enclosed spaces (as I explain below). An even bigger issue is the extreme caution of C.D.C. officials, who picked a benchmark — 10 percent — so high that nobody could reasonably dispute it.
That benchmark “seems to be a huge exaggeration,” as Dr. Muge Cevik, a virologist at the University of St. Andrews, said. In truth, the share of transmission that has occurred outdoors seems to be below 1 percent and may be below 0.1 percent, multiple epidemiologists told me. The rare outdoor transmission that has happened almost all seems to have involved crowded places or close conversation.
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.
This isn’t just a gotcha math issue. It is an example of how the C.D.C. is struggling to communicate effectively, and leaving many people confused about what’s truly risky. —NYTimes
Credit where it is due, in this article, David Leonhardt of the New York Times committed an honest-to-God random act of journalism. He reported facts, without looking for a way to score political points for (or against) a preferred political target.
The point he is making touches EXACTLY on the problem that Biden has. In elevating political mandates to the level of religious dogma, they have blurred the lines between fact and fearmongering, which undercut their own admonitions that we should ‘believe the science’.
Actual science does not require hyperbole. It does not eschew vigorous cross-examination. And most importantly, it does not create policy.
The only thing science can give you is data points. How that data is interpreted is entirely on whoever is handling that data.
It is subject to the person’s biases, fears, private agendas, corrupted motives, lobbing efforts, and any of a thousand other considerations.
For all the hoopla over science in the past year, those talking heads on TV never bothered to wonder: why is it that elected officials, rather than anonymous men or women in lab coats, make public policy?
The answer is simple. Politicians can be held accountable to We The People if they make decisions based on the wrong set of tradeoffs… for example, decisions that drive people into bankruptcy over wildly inflated risk models because a frightened public is more easily controlled by the government than one making rational decisions based on risk management.
Ironically, after all of this ‘misinformation’ talk, it is the CDC — more than some tin-foil hat rando on FacistBook or Twitter — that is undermining confidence in the very science the public used to rely on in their risk-management decision-making. They have undermined it by showing the experts themselves to be liars.
Now that they’ve been caught in a deliberate lie, ‘spreading disinformation’ about COVID should they have to pay a price for it?