Coyote Blog

Many of the early failings in COVID response can be laid right at the doorstep of the CDC and FDA.

Shortages of testing?  The FDA refused to approve an tests except those developed at the CDC, and then the CDC tests failed.  Later, the FDA was really slow and conservative in approving new test approaches (eg home testing).

Shortages of PPE?  We learned that PPE manufacturers were all heavily regulated by the FDA, and FDA rules prevented quick ramp-ups, while liability rules made folks like 3M reluctant to shift N95 masks from non-medical to medical markets.

Slow vaccine rollout?  The FDA was its usual conservative self in approving vaccines, and refused to give any credit to vaccines approved by other western nations.  THEY had to approve it too.

First doses first?  No way, the CDC and FDA would not even consider it.   The conservative approach was to insist the vaccines be used exactly as originally tested, despite testing on the Pfizer vaccine showing that 1 dose of it was over 80% effective.  Now we see the world leader in reducing cases is the UK, which is the one country that did first doses first.

In a sane world, the CDC and FDA would have gotten hammered for what could be described as following peacetime rules in during wartime.  Add to that their ever-shifting and contradictory guidance, and guidance on NPI's that went against the sum of scientific research that had been published pre-2020, and you should have expected a LOT of media scrutiny of them in 202o.   Instead there was virtually none, and if anything the media fetishized and hero-worshipped these agencies.  Why?

As usual, the answer is Trump.  By 2020 the media was in the habit of blaming everything on Trump.  If COVID tests were in short supply, it must be Trump's fault.  No further scrutiny was needed.  In fact, no further scrutiny was wanted, because no explanation excerpt for "Trump's fault" was wanted.  Granted Trump helped them to some extent by his usual habit of off-the-cuff stupid statements.  But the media went ever further -- they wanted an anti-pole to Trump, and these agencies and morons like Dr. Fauci were elevated to sainthood not because they did anything right but because they could be portrayed as not-Trump.

For the media, whatever the FDA or CDC said represented scientific consensus.  Which is a horrible bastardization of science.  The FDA and CDC are not "science" and scientific "consensus", if such a thing is even real, is based on a quasi-antagonistic process of challenge and response between differing hypotheses (a process by the way the media actually undermined by de-platforming one side of many of the COVID-related debates) and not dictats by government agencies.  The FDA and CDC are populated by politicians and government bureaucrats who happen to have scientific degrees.  They are subject to all the same influences and bad incentives as any other political organization.  For example, in the government there are very different risk profiles between action and inaction.  Essentially, bureaucrats are seldom held accountable for deaths and harm from inaction -- if people die because they are slow to approve a new drug or procedure, no one puts that on them.  But they try to avoid at all costs approving something that eventually hurts someone, even if that harm is far less than the benefits of what they approved.  But instead of making all this clear, the media granted them the secular form of Papal infallibility.

So now we arrive at April 2021, and the FDA shut down the use of the J&J vaccine because it has about a 1 in a million chance of causing blood clots and a one in 6 million chance of causing a fatality.  People seem suddenly surprised that the FDA would do such a thing that is obviously so irrational (the number of lives saved by the vaccine is  -- by everyone's estimate -- orders of magnitude larger that those who have died from this side effect that may not actually even be due to the vaccine).

What is surprising to me is that anyone is surprised.  The FDA has ALWAYS acted this way.  Libertarians have called them out of this for years (thus, for example, libertarian-sponsored right to try laws).  In particular, failure after failure of COVID response in 2020 can be laid right at the FDA's doorstep, but we were just having too much fun demonizing Trump to actually look for root causes.  Well, now our inattention has come back to bite us with this absurd FDA decision.  The only good thing that can come from it is the potential that we might finally consider some reforms.

Interesting if slightly odd story today:

About 5 to 10 percent of U.S. high-school boys say they've been "physically forced" to have sexual intercourse against their will, according to survey results reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Those surprising numbers come from the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance report published by the CDC on June 8, and are based on student-reported answers to 2011 national and state surveys.

Click here to see the report. The results concerning high-school students and forced sex can be seen on pages 66-68....

The survey results show girls reporting an even higher percentages of rapes -- 11.8 percent nationally.

So, what is your guess?  Is their an epidemic of boy rape (homosexual I assume but apparently the survey is not taken in a way that one can tell) or are the CDC numbers that women's groups so often like to trumpet basically garbage?

Went away for a few days with my wife and came down with some kind of flu thing everyone we know in Phoenix seems to have.  Temperature, sore throat, coughing, achy joints, headache but fortunately no barfing.  Without the vomiting, I can power through what I have to get done, its just not fun.

I am wondering if the CDC uses social media data to track disease outbreaks.  I have seem Twitter data showing dynamically when such and such event happened by geotagged Twitter traffic.  Be interesting to do that with all tweets with the word "sick".

Apparently, the mortality rates from obesity that the media has been breathlessly lecturing us with were overestimated by at least 1500%:

But in a study released this week by the CDC
and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association ("Excess Deaths
Associated with Underweight, Overweight, and Obesity"), the public health
community has finally owned up to their massive fib by acknowledging that the
number of deaths due to obesity in the US is closer to 26,000 not 400,000 as
previously reported.

The part of the earlier study that really got people's attention was the fact that even those slightly overweight but well short of obese had a significantly increased risk of death.  Now, the CDC channels Emily Littella in saying "never mind":

for the merely overweight with BMI's from 25-30 there is no excess mortality. In
fact, being overweight was "associated with a slight reduction in mortality
relative to the normal weight category." Being overweight not only does not lead
to premature death, something that dozens of other studies from around the world
have been saying for the last 30 years, but it also carries less risk from
premature death than being "normal" weight. In other words the overweight=early death "fact" proclaimed
by the public health community is simply not true.

In fact, the study argues, the risks from being underweight are greater than overweight, something that resonates with me having known two women who died due to complications from anorexia.

Other studies will have to replicate these findings, but this study does seem to have taken a more careful approach than previous approaches.  One thing you can be sure about, is that this will not stop lawsuits against fast food companies, since overwhelming medical evidence of the safety of breast implants has not stopped litigation in that arena.  Heck, the fact that most people who are suing asbestos companies admits they are not even sick has not stopped litigation in that arena.

I didn't really pay much attention to the typical 24-hour partisan finger-pointing flurry accompanying the stats showing an uptick in US infant mortality rates.  However, looking back on it, it is a good lesson about how statistics are routinely misused in this country (via Captain's Quarters).  Critics of the administration and the health care system used the statistics to try to show something is wrong with the US. 

Two weeks ago, Nicholas Kristof wrote a column on the first increase in the American infant-mortality rate in decades, taking the opportunity to excoriate Americans and the Bush administration as uncaring and unresponsive to the deaths of children. He compared the US unfavorably with Cuba and China

Unfortunately, this conclusion was flawed:

babies that would die in the womb or at stillbirth elsewhere are born alive in the US. Many of these survive completely, but because of their precarious state, they tend to die at higher percentages than normal births. That's why the numbers rose slightly for 2002. The CDC doesn't expect to see another increase like it.

The solution might be to look at the survival rate at year one as a percentage of total pregnancies, not just births (though you would have to exclude abortions).