I want to give two examples, one medical and one technological, of the kind of buffoonery that the CDC is engaging in that continues to make them untrustworthy as a disease-control organization.
Medical buffoonery
Here are some things that COVID-19 research and recently collected epidemiological data are telling us at the moment:
- Immunity from the mRNA vaccines weakens significantly within a few months after vaccination. The most common recommendation among experts in the field is that getting a booster every four months is wise.
- Immunity generated by the Novavax vaccine, which uses a protein platform rather than mRNA, seems to be more broad-spectrum, and in particular may generate stronger immunity to the XBB1.5 COVID-19 variant that is quickly becoming dominant worldwide.
Here is what a sane center for disease control would do with this information:
- Authorize boosters every four months for anyone who wants them and encourage everyone to get boosted.
- Authorize the Novavax vaccine as a booster for anyone who wants it and encourage people who haven’t gotten that vaccine before to get it.
Here is what the U.S. Centers for Disease Control is doing instead:
- Not consistently authorizing boosters every four months.
- Not authorizing the Novavax vaccine for most people.
How do I know this? Because I haven’t been vaccinated in more than four months, and I’ve never received the Novavax COVID-19 vaccine, and today when I went to a nearby vaccination site and attempted to get a booster, it was refused to me on the grounds that the CDC has not yet authorized people like me to receive another booster. I am, according to the CDC, “too vaccinated” to need another booster right now. This is not a position supported by science.
Technological buffoonery
After being denied a booster today, I came home and decided I wanted to subscribe to email updates from the CDC so that I will ideally be notified immediately when the CDC changes its policies to allow me to get another booster. After a little searching I found the CDC News & Updates subscriptions page.
I entered “covid” in the search box, which returned four results. I initially decided I wanted to subscribe to all four of them, so I checked all four checkboxes, but then I decided I didn’t want one of the four, so I clicked that checkbox again to uncheck it. Oddly, it didn’t uncheck, so I clicked it again, and this time the second time the checkmark went away. Then I entered my email address in the text box provided for that purpose and clicked the “Subscribe” button. Here’s what the page looked like immediately before I clicked “Subscribe”:
Here’s what the page looked like immediately after I clicked “Subscribe”:
See the problem? The subscription which I unchecked was nevertheless still included in my subscription.
But wait, there’s more.
I received the email mentioned on that screen and clicked on the link in it. Here’s what I saw when I clicked that link:
Here’s what happened when I entered my email address and clicked “Submit”:
I repeated the entire subscription process a second time, without changing any of the steps, and this time it worked.
The CDC was once the preeminent governmental public health organization in the world. Now their COVID-19 guidance is garbage and they can’t even build a working web site.
