Let’s flip a coin
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s overhaul of a federal immunization panel has created uncertainty around how widely vaccines will be available this fall and if they’ll be free, according tosix current and former health officials.
You want vaccines to be widely available and free, so that more people get them.
After Kennedy purged the influential committee that recommends vaccines and appointed his own picks, staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who provide the panel withresearch have now been pushed aside, according to the officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation. With the new advisers scheduled to meet in less than two weeks,other CDC staff are also uncertain whether they will be able to present the necessary scientific and medical data to help the committee make informed decisions, officials said.
It’s unclear what direction this new group, which includes vaccine critics, will go, and whether they’ll be able to give the stamp of approval needed for Americans to get free vaccines against coronavirus and other pathogens in time for the fall vaccine season.
“If we have a system that has been dismantled — one that allowed for open, evidence-based decision-making and that supported transparent and clear dialogue about vaccines — and then we replace it with a process that’s driven largely by one person’s beliefs, that creates a system that cannot be trusted,” Helen Chu, a professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine who was ousted from the vaccine committee, said in a news conference Thursday.
And that’s bad, because if the system is not trusted, fewer people will get vaccinated, and that’s bad.
HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon said the previous members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices had become a rubber stamp for any vaccine. “This group will go where the science takes them,” he said in a statement, noting half of the eightnew appointments have previously served on federal health boards. “Secretary Kennedy has replaced vaccine groupthink with a diversity of viewpoints on ACIP.”
Yeah you don’t want a “variety of viewpoints” on this subject. It’s not a movie review or a chat about personalities; it’s a technical subject, on which random people’s random opinions are not useful.
The CDC official overseeing theoperations of the paneland the staff who gather and present vaccine data was removed from her role this week, according to two current and one former federal health official. Melinda Wharton,who has nearly 20 years experience in vaccines and immunization at the agency, has been replaced by the director of scheduling and advance in the immediate office of the CDC director. The new official now reports toCDC’s chief of staff, a political appointee, the officials said.
“The biggest fear is that science and data won’t be the primary drivers of decisions,” said one federal health official. “The largest public health concern is that this move will end up broadly restricting vaccine access.”
All because of one conceited crank sitting in the boss chair.
I’ve always said Lysenko played a large role in bringing down the Soviet Union. Now Kennedy will have his role in destroying the US.
I can almost see how this “shooting the messenger” approach might vaguely make sense (in a twisted kind of way), but I can’t see how this “shooting the messenger, and replacing him with someone who’s going to result in even more bad news that needs to be swept under the rug” way of doing things is going to Make America Great Again. How does killing off poorer people by epidemic disease aid this, particularly if those same poor people are expected to take up the slack of all the
disappeareddeported immigrants who had been doing the shitty jobs that Americans wouldn’t?Actually, Americans will do these jobs. There are areas that have not had a lot of immigrants, and those jobs are being done. It’s just that Americans will expect minimum wage or better; they have rights, and they usually know what they are.
Several people I know were working jobs that “Americans wouldn’t”. They lost those jobs. They didn’t have skills to find other jobs, and many of them were neuroatypical or just not academic minded.
At some point, the left fell in love with this mantra – the jobs Americans won’t do – and repeated it over and over and over. This helped a lot of the people who were doing those jobs, or who had once done those jobs but they were no longer available, turn toward MAGA.
It is possible, even easy, to make arguments that favor immigration. Let’s not make arguments that make things worse without checking to see what is true. For Republicans, the “Americans” wouldn’t do these jobs because they are not in the habit of considering women, people of color, or neuroatypical people as “Real Americans”®. The left picked up the refrain without stopping to think about the implications.
It’s easy in the large coastal cities to think that Americans won’t do those jobs, because there have always been immigrants doing them, as long as people can remember. Here in the Midwest, it’s a lot different. At the time I arrived in Nebraska, there were few immigrants in my town. It was a largely white town. The jobs got done. They were done almost exclusively by white people, because that was the available job pool. Now the town has got a large and thriving Mexican population, but a lot of those ‘shitty’ jobs are still being done by the white people. The Hispanic community has found a nice niche in construction and roofing, which pay a damn sight better than custodians or summer farm jobs.
Don’t worry, Americans will do these jobs.
Getting sick more often will make them poorer and more desperate to take them, and I’m quite sure minimum wage laws will not survive the next year.