CDC needs to admit its Covid-19 mistakes

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) announced it will overhaul itself in response to pandemic mistakes. The first thing the CDC should do is to clarify what those mistakes were.
While many experts think those mistakes are obvious, half of the public assumes the mistakes involved too many, overly strict rules that were kept in place too long, and the other half assumes the mistakes all revolved around rules that were too loose and abandoned too soon.
Some are furious that the agency suggested vaccinated people could take their masks off in the spring and summer of 2021. Others are furious that mask mandates returned and proliferated as the country dealt with vaccine-evading variants.
The CDC is also in the business of conducting studies and here, too, some people say the agency erred in promoting its own studies before they were peer reviewed. Others are accusing the CDC of being too slow to make its data public.
It looks like a no-win situation for the organization. But transparency could help placate both sides.
The purpose of the CDC is to serve the public, and part of that is to communicate with us clearly and honestly. That means honesty about uncertainty, which is always an issue in science but more so when dealing with something that’s never happened before. (Yes, there was the 1918 flu, but Covid is a very different pathogen spreading in a changed world.)
Early in the pandemic, the CDC had to act on a novel situation which was threatening to cause a collapse of the healthcare system unless they did something right away — before there was time to do studies. That’s when total transparency about the level of uncertainty would have helped people the most. It would have seeded the ground to help people understand and accept that polices would be changing as scientists’ knowledge advanced. But the CDC was not up front about all they didn’t know.
Moreover, they never sufficiently shared the goals behind some of their recommendations. What were the goals of all the stay-at-home orders that became known as lockdowns? While it worked to “flatten the curve” in New York City and Boston, the message was they’d be lifted when it was “safe” — a goal that was known to be impossible even back then. And the lockdowns were imposed and lifted before the big surges in places like Texas, Oklahoma and South Dakota. Why was that timing so off? And as lockdowns were replaced with universal masking, what were the goals there? Under what circumstances would masking end?
By May 2020, with people still clamouring for more information about relative risks of different scenarios and activities, I found most of the useful data came from other countries, not the CDC. The media disseminated the most important consumer data about local case counts and hospitalizations, with outlets like The Atlantic and The New York Times offering user-friendly maps and graphs. And after vaccines became available, it was Bloomberg News that came out with a vaccine tracker. Rochelle Walensky, the current CDC director, was slammed for ending and then re-instating mask recommendations after the vaccine rollouts.

—Bloomberg