The CDC has failed: Ex-health officials urge states to abandon agency

[SheltieLover]

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/09/ignore-the-cdc-former-top-health-experts-say-some-states-already-have/?amp=1

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is promoting policies that will prolong the COVID-19 pandemic and, as such, states and local leaders should disregard the agency and strike out on their own. That’s according to Harold Varmus, the Nobel-prize-winning scientist and former director of the National Institutes of Health, and Rajiv Shah, the former administrator of the United States Agency for International Development and current president of the Rockefeller Foundation.

The two laid out their argument against the CDC in a searing opinion piece in The New York Times Monday, titled: “It Has Come to This: Ignore the CDC.”

Varmus and Shah’s dramatic disavowal of the country’s leading public health agency was spurred by its abrupt changes last week to COVID-19 testing guidance, which now discourages testing of people who have been exposed to the pandemic coronavirus but do not have symptoms.

Doctors, public health practitioners, and infectious disease experts roundly decried the changes, noting that evidence clearly indicates that people without symptoms play a significant role in spreading the pandemic coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. The president of the American Medical Association called the change “a recipe for community spread and more spikes in coronavirus.” The Infectious Disease Society of America called for “the immediate reversal” of the change.

More at link.

[BootinUp]

1. if you cant take their word for it, you are lost. nt

[mainer]

2. The State of Maine is already going its own way

and ignoring CDC advice about not testing recent contacts. Sane states are following the science, not Trump's CDC. Thank god for our Democratic governor.