Late last week, two prominent doctors wrote a Substack article claiming that the Biden Administration is not “following the science” and is receiving “bad advice” from its own health agencies. The predictable result, they said, is low morale at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), as well as a mass exodus of employees. The post, dated July 14, was written by Marty Makary M.D., M.P.H., and Tracy Beth Høeg M.D., Ph.D.
According to their bios, Dr. Makary is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, the author of The Price We Pay, and a medical advisor to Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin (R). Dr. Høeg, meanwhile, is an epidemiologist affiliated with The Florida Department of Health who has published research on COVID in schools in the CDC’s journal MMWR. With these credentials, they should be taken seriously.
They write about two CDC scientists who are “embarrassed” to work at the CDC:
Why are they embarrassed? In short, bad science.
The longer answer: that the heads of their agencies are using weak or flawed data to make critically important public health decisions. That such decisions are being driven by what’s politically palatable to people in Washington or to the Biden administration. And that they have a myopic focus on one virus instead of overall health.
It’s deeply troubling that health decisions are being driven by politics, and it’s the exact opposite of what Joe promised on the campaign trail. “Follow the science” seems to be a thing of the past.
An absolute blockbuster article by @TracyBethHoeg and @MartyMakary. Insider interviews with @CDCgov and @NIH scientists reveal tremendous political pressure to distort covid science and vax recommendations. Our public health agencies are in disarray. Excellent reporting! https://t.co/yx1SQXFWL4
— Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) July 14, 2022
Many of us have long felt that the majority of state and federal government COVID policies have been political rather than health-related, and here is confirmation. The doctors go on to point out the disastrous effect such policies have had on our children:
First, they demanded that young children be masked in schools. On this score, the agencies were wrong. Compelling studies later found schools that masked children had no different rates of transmission. And for social and linguistic development, children need to see the faces of others.
If masks weren’t bad enough, the closing of schools across the nation brought more mental and developmental problems to our kids, the true effects which probably won’t be fully known for years:
Next came school closures. The agencies were wrong—and catastrophically so. Poor and minority children suffered learning loss with an 11-point drop in math scores alone and a 20% drop in math pass rates. There are dozens of statistics of this kind.
As a father with children during the endless, over a year-and-a-half California school lockdown, I know full well the devastation that such boneheaded policies inflicted upon my kids. Suffice it to say that we are still recovering as a family.
The doctors go on to describe how the agencies recently pushed the childhood vaccine despite little evidence that it was safe and effective. I reported on July 5 on how the Biden Administration rushed the authorization for the little kid vax and the decision was “political” and “showed hypocrisy.” The Substack doctors agree:
The trouble is that this sweeping recommendation was based on extremely weak, inconclusive data provided by Pfizer and Moderna….
Referring to Pfizer’s vaccine efficacy in healthy young children, one high-level CDC official—whose expertise is in the evaluation of clinical data—joked: “You can inject them with it or squirt it in their face, and you’ll get the same benefit.”
If you think these last two years have eroded the public’s confidence in our health authorities, you’d be right: the authors claim that only 2 percent of parents with children under 5 have decided to have their babies and toddlers dosed despite relentless efforts by the administration to convince them to do so. People aren’t stupid—they know when they’re not being told the full truth.
The authors point out other problems within various agencies’ discussions about COVID response, notably the refusal to account for natural immunity. What’s more interesting—and damning—than any individual decision is the overall culture and political pressure they describe from within the agencies. Here are some examples:
“It felt like we were a political tool,” a CDC scientist told us about the issue…
As one NIH scientist told us: “There’s a silence, an unwillingness for agency scientists to say anything. Even though they know that some of what’s being said out of the agency is absurd…”
That was a theme we heard over and over again—people felt like they couldn’t speak freely, even internally within their agencies. “You get labeled based on what you say. If you talk about it you will suffer, I’m convinced,” an FDA staffer told us. Another person at that agency added: “If you speak honestly, you get treated differently…”
The fact that there is no public dissent or debate can only be explained by the fact that they are—or at least feel that they are—being muzzled.
The authors conclude, “The official public health response to Covid has undermined the public’s belief in public health itself. This is a terrible outcome with potentially disastrous consequences. ”
This damning article describes multiple instances of what so many of us have been feeling since Biden took over the reins of the federal government’s COVID response, and since virus-obsessed Democrat governors in places like California and Michigan began throwing down nonsensical, draconian edicts to “stop the spread.” The fact is, the Biden Administration has not been “following the science” since day one, and in reality, most of its policies are downright political, and have utterly failed to “stop the spread.” It’s a dangerous precedent for our nation.
Authored by Bob Hoge via RedState
