Tens of millions of Americans who have relied on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s advice on dealing with Covid-19 are now adrift. Maggie Koerth, a senior science writer for FiveThirtyEight, charges that the agency “mired in political influence” has “failed to address many of the most relevant questions for day-to-day decision-making.”
This lack of leadership has consequences, Koerth observes. Having lost faith in the CDC’s ever-changing advice, many who previously heeded its counsel are now seeking wisdom “in the dark alleys of the internet, hoping the information we’re getting is the real deal and not just another cheap Rolex.”
Koerth is among those who have followed — or tried to follow — CDC’s shifting and often poorly evidenced guidance. They wore gloves when CDC told them to wear gloves, ditched the gloves and donned cloth masks when told they warded off viruses, cleansed their food with Clorox wipes and their hands with Purell, locked themselves and their families in their homes, got “fully vaccinated” with two jabs, and then a third when told that two weren’t enough, strapped masks on their two-year-olds, and got their kids vaxxed, double-vaxxed, and triple-vaxxed.
Then came Omicron.
Communities with shuttered schools, mask mandates, and vaccine passports had an explosion of cases. In New York and Los Angeles, Paris and Rome, mask wearers, the boosted, and those who foreswore handshakes and hugs got infected. The spike in cases dwarfed previous highs, and fears of overcrowded hospitals recurred.
Dr. Anthony Fauci announced that the variant “will ultimately find just about everybody.” President Biden conceded that “both vaccinated and unvaccinated people are testing positive.”
Undeterred by those sobering facts, the president once again called it a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” The unvaccinated “are crowding our hospitals, leaving little room for anyone else who might have a heart attack or an injury in an automobile accident or any injury at all,” he alleged.
Biden’s Claims Are Not Supported by Data
As with the president’s previous pandemic pronouncements, this one is unsupported by the data.
First, hospitals routinely test everyone they admit for Covid-19. According to Health and Human Services, just over 22 percent of inpatient beds were “in use for COVID-19” on January 19. That doesn’t mean that 22 percent of inpatients occupied those beds because they tested positive for Covid. Many were receiving treatment for...
