I hope these people are able to find other ways to protect the public from disease, even if not at CDC.
I respect their decisions, but our country deeply needs scientists so committed to the Hippocratic oath that they’d rather resign than contribute to endangering public safety.
Those who do not seek power are most fit to hold it.
I have nothing really to say other than this is saddening to read.
Is this about the upcoming reveal of the autism findings, or is the article just feeding that as the cause?
I thought the understanding for base rates of autism was that people are living longer and starting their lives later. Becoming financially stable later, having children later. Having children later rather than earlier significantly increased the risk of autism.
After that then the question becomes about intensity of autistic symptoms, where the base rate of autistic children makes sense given the data, but the intensity and thus increased likelihood of seeking diagnosis may be increasing as a second factor which sits on top of expanded diagnosis standards.
For intensity, there are suggestions that maybe obesity, plastics/chemicals could be contributing, but it sounded like there wasn't enough data on it.
I'm not sure what other answer they found. RFK has said he doesn't think people should follow his personal health advice. He knows he's neither a scientist or a doctor and supposedly there was some team of scientists working on it. I'm not prejudging that they can't have arrived at some useful result, but it's obviously very politicized.
Maureen Durkin, an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, just presented a paper [1] (currently in peer review) studying 8 year olds from 2000 to 2016, categorizing and counting autism severity over time. The most severe cases were unchanged, or decreased, and the largest change was in those with no measurable functional limitations.
This unpublished paper suggests that identification of children with milder symptoms is the strongest driver.
[1] "Trends in the Prevalence of Autism By Adaptive Level between 2000-2016: Evidence from a Population-Based Sample of 8-Year-Old Children in the United States" S. M. Furnier and M. S. Durkin
It is not just about that. The trump admin fired high level and long-standing officials within cdc over disagreements about vaccine policy and that was followed by a bunch of resignations in protest.
I think more important than most of the specifics here is how Dump is choosing government appointees: Someone who is terrible at whatever job they are given, and the public proclamation that "no one should take my advice" is an acceptable statement.
Wouldn't it be better that he at least says shit like, "as we ramp up militarization, killing and removing all the foreigners will get less germs in the air, aheeyuk" Like he is trying at a bare minimum brain level at the job?
If I was a foreign state asset that somehow became the US president, I don't really know how I could hurt the US's leadership more than what's happening right now. In that light, each move Trump is doing is quite brilliant.
It's so sad to see these attacks on institions that are intended to save lives and cure horrible diseases.
Many moons ago, during civil service and volunteer work with kids, I've occasionally been confronted with parents who were anti-vaccination or followed some esoteric stance on medicine. When the anger faded away, those days always made me so very sad and frustrated that the only thing you apparently can do is play the very long game of education and somehow try to keep up hope for a more enlightened future.
Worth reiterating since the phrase "attacks on institutions" more usually implies bureaucratic maneuvers. These people have incited actual murderous gun attacks: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj0y796qqp9o
It's a crying shame that given the choice, the voters picked the modern-day equivalent of Lysenkoism[1].
[1] Which due to the timing of its adoption and abandonment did avoid outright causing famines in the Soviet Union... And went on to kill tens of millions of people in China.
The inability for intelligent people to frame their policies and positions in ways very stupid simple people can understand is the biggest failing of the last 50+ years if not longer.
It is odd to see someone in a society which worships willful ignorance and aggressive stupidy advance the position that somehow the smart people are responsible for not having figured a way to force the morons to a position that they have no intention of occupying.
They believe that the set of values and beliefs that they hold true or false advantage them and perceive education as an attack on their values. Most if them are happy to degrade and diminish anyone who tries some are willing to murder.
They will listen to anyone who tells them what they like to hear. They will not listen to anyone who tells them what they don't like to hear. They shop around for truths they prefer like they're items at Costco.
People’s preferences tend very strongly toward whatever requires the least action on their part. If the problem is with someone else, then you never have to be part of the solution
It’s political preferences, not laziness. People aren’t listening to Rogan or whoever and ignoring the CDC because of laziness. They are doing that because they follow what their social and/or political community thinks and does.
Feels like this whole thread is trying to pin this on individual preferences or whatever. But it’s a social effect, and individual personalities or intelligence have very little to do with it. If you lived in these communities, unless you are neurodivergent, you would be doing the same thing.
>If you lived in these communities, unless you are neurodivergent, you would be doing the same thing.
As someone who grew up in one of these communities, this has not been my experience. Many, many people move away, and for varied reasons. What you're left with are people who stay in economically declining areas and want to blame everyone else for it. It's selection bias, and it is absolutely based on personal choice.
I don't think people have gotten stupider or leaders have gotten worse at justifying their policies. IMO what is happening here is a consequence of a catastrophic loss of trust in elites and institutions.
I disagree, Trump is about as elite as elites come. And the Republicans are hardly underdogs - they're long standing incumbents in many ways.
What's happening is that the Republicans have captured populist messaging pretty well, the Democrats just haven't.
Populism is usually stupid but it's extremely effective if you can flood information stream, particularly new ones. I mean, Radio pretty much made Hitler.
The timing here is perfect. Internet has just become mainstream and is still trusted and our brains haven't developed patterns of discernment. In addition, the economy for every day working people is bad. Its the perfect breeding ground for populism.
It’s a big mistake to thing of people as stupid: they’d be far less dangerous if they actually were.
The problem isn’t lack of intelligence but the information space they inhabit and the feeling that they have somehow been mistreated. There’s an entire genre of “why are leopards eating my face?” schadenfreude posts about MAGAs asking why Trump is doing some “surprising” thing he said he was going to do for years. Because they’re _not_ stupid, once they’ve thrown in with a side they’ll put a lot of effort into coming up with rationalizations or attacks to try to “balance” things out. The bitter grievances are really powerful because they let people talk themselves into seeing things as necessary sacrifices: sure, you’re losing Medicaid and paying more in taxes but the alternative is living in a world where Riley Gaines was forced to tie for fifth so I guess you just have to tighten your belt on behalf of female athletes.
With all due respect, what you're describing is still stupidity. 'A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds' as Emerson said.
The people who voted for Trump (or against Biden) because they hadn't been paying attention over the last decade and just thought the price of eggs was too high were stupid. The people who knew exactly what Trump was about and just didn't think the leopards would eat their faces were stupid. The people who voted because they just wanted to be entertained watching the world burn were stupid.
There's more than one kind of stupidity, and when they combine en masse into a big dumb avalanche it can absolutely be dangerous.
Fair, I guess my point was not to underestimate your opponents: assume that they’re just as smart and motivated but are using their talents based on the Fox News cinematic universe / Christian nationalism.
I live in DC so right now a lot of my neighbors are having surreal conversations with their extended family members who are saying things which would make sense if you started with certain false pretenses like all of the police statistics being faked. One of them was telling me about how they were talking with someone who had an Ivy degree, serious job, etc. but wouldn’t believe that our downtown wasn’t a movie gangland even though his own relative was telling him they take young kids in those area all the time and never see anything more unsafe than an out of control toddler on a bike. They kept coming up with complicated “maybe you missed” theories because they couldn’t bear to question that one starting premise. If you want to call that stupid, sure, but I think we might want a different term it.
>frame their policies and positions in ways very stupid simple people can understand
This doesn't matter when the intelligent people are working within the confines of reality and their opposition lies gratuitously. The stupid people are choosing the option they want to believe and apparently no amount of education or framing is going to change that.
Disagree, I think they've done a moderately good job of it. The problem is that you have other intelligent but cynical people who are prepared to invest fortunes in convincing stupid people to believe things that actively undermine their interests. Long before 4chan and social media came along, you had tabloid newspapers, radio stations, and publishers whose sole goal was to dumb people down by appealing to paranoia, selfishness, and vapidity.
> "disease very bad. disease may kill. inject this. you less likely to get disease."
The actual argument is that by everyone getting injected, society as a whole crosses a threshold where viruses fail to spread exponentially and don't cause pandemics.
It's a more nuanced, more complex reason that some (incredibly selfish) people are just unable to grasp.
"Why would I ever a tiny personal risk to stop other people getting sick!?" was a very common argument during the COVID pandemic.
At this point, I don't think it's an inability - all sorts of messages get broadcast - but an unwillingness to actually talk to people with different worldviews.
The easy way to spread a pro-health message to the people who really need to comply with it is to say "letting disease spread is Nergal worship (2 Kings 17:30), and America is a Christian nation." Just spam that, nonstop, until it is as embedded in their minds as whatever derangement Trump has come up with this time - because this is the kind of thing they respond to.
The second thing is more complicated: to admit that a lot of "sexual health" only applies to people engaging in highly risky behavior, and should be handled separately both in messaging and in practice from general health. You can still make them support it, but with an explicit "do good even to the sinner" messaging. Throw in a few "We are currently promoting abortion because free school lunches have been canceled" and you WILL see movement.
Both of these are considered abominable among the current Democrat party, because it involves speaking the language of people with different values.
Why would they listen to nonsense that makes them uncomfortable, as opposed to their expressed preference of listening to nonsense that makes them comfortable?
It doesn't matter how much you cite Matthew 19:24 to someone who already had their brain rotted by, say, prosperity gospel. They don't give a shit.
This has nothing to do with intelligence, and everything to do with cults, beliefs, fears, Russian disinformation campaigns, political alignment, etc.
I've seen intelligent people fall for crazy conspiracy theories. Once all those antivaxers became pro-Russia, which basically has nothing to do with each other, it became clear were all this disinformation was coming from (talking mainly about Central Europe here, but I'm sure it applies to US too)
This has been a part of their national agenda since the Communist revolution. "If we can't improve our own country, at least we can fuck up everybody else's."
Yeah, nothing Trump has done has been particular surprising, but the enthusiasm with which huge portions of America have welcomed or shrugged at his insa has been the real shocker.
IMO there's a small (very) enthusiastic portion of America, then a much larger portion that simply didn't like inflation and would've voted any incumbent out of power. Very poor timing that has already caused generational damage, at least.
Inflation in November 2024 was 2.7%. That's higher than the Fed target, but hardly "throw out the incumbent at all costs". I know that "inflation" is what they told pollsters, but I have a hard time believing that. Maybe some of it; not all of it, or the biggest part of it.
As to what it actually was... that's less clear to me. I'm sure it was a multiplicity of factors, some of which reflect poorly on us as Americans. (All of us.) I think we accept the "inflation" explanation because it's easier than confronting those.
This speaks to the gap between what economists measure and what the public sees.
Here's a more on-the-ground perspective: The price of food went up 50% during COVID, and you caused it since you were in power. You will make it go back down to how it was before, or I will vote for someone else.
(The average voter runs on simpler emotions like this and does not take into account that Trump will most likely cause much more inflation, which is what he has done)
Incumbents (left- and right-wing alike) lost power in almost every election in the world in 2023 and 2024, and the overwhelming majority of voters said the economy was their number one issue.
Eh, it's common knowledge that "the masses" are vulnerable to demagoguery. The elites who absolutely do know better hold far more blame –– many of them still well-regarded on this very forum!
> It's a crying shame that given the choice, the voters picked the modern-day equivalent of Lysenkoism[1].
Those voters (who needless to say had never heard of Lysenko) were told by trusted, well-spoken, authoritative, legitimate seeming sources that this was a mainstream position and a very reasonable one. The people who needed to say it was bullshit were deliberately excluded.
And yeah, that applies specifically to Fox News and Facebook, but also to Rogan and the manosphere, and to 4chan.
And to HN, quite frankly. If you want to know why people turned away from science just go back and watch the discourse around late COVID or whatever. And note how it was utterly dominated by the loons in throwaway accounts. Some of us tried fighting back and ended up incessantly flagged and rate-limited, so we gave up. "Reasonable" HN posters fled the field in favor of bland tech discussion (or retreated in the face of "moderation"), and someone looking at the issue without context might assume that the modern Lysenkos must have had a point.
Modern social media teaches you to either engage if the topic gives you happy brain feels, or disengage completely so it never shows up in your feed. The more you "fight" a cause, the more you promote it and the more you see it.
FWIW HN doesn't have personalized feeds like that. We all see the same front page. But regardless:
The loons loved it indeed, and it was all over the front page. Right here. Blaming that on the rest of us seems ridiculous, but sort of besides the point. I don't care about blame, I'm saying that whoever you want to blame, it is us, right here, on HN, not some abstract "voters". We made this problem. We told people that masks didn't work and vaccines were poison. If not you and I personally, people writing prose in proxy for us did.
On balance, Hacker News stood solidly on the side of RFK2 and against the CDC in this particular war. It just did.
I think you're overestimating how influential Hacker News is on the discourse of society at large.
Many people here were (and still are) solidly anti-vaccine but in the grand scheme Hacker News was just one of innumerable maelstroms on the internet, and far from the biggest. More realistically, Hacker news is just full of people who aren't any more immune to propaganda than anyone else.
I'm not blaming HN specifically or especially, I'm saying that tut tutting about all those dumb "voters" and "Lysenkoists" is shortsighted. The problem is right here. If you want to know why "they" were so dumb you only need to answer why WE were equally dumb.
My general sense is that the tut-tut set is very much an overlap in the Venn diagram with the libertarians who deliberately enabled this nonsense originally and refuse to treat with their own complicity.
But I've spent most of my limited budget on posting about this, so I'll stop now.
Now they can demand that Intel investigate internal “waste fraud and abuse” since it’s partially owned by the government. It goes from “the government should run more like a business” to the government telling businesses “run more like the government running more like a business”
Another communist parallel: MAGA is aimed in the general direction of a Great Leap Forward [0] to screw over the American economy and industry with incompetent autarky, and also a Cultural Revolution [1] for persecuting "woke elites" (subject-matter experts) leading to international brain-drain.
I really hope the American people can put the brakes on that, because it took China decades to recover.
I have no reasonable theory as to how Trump/RFK will be able to reveal credible information about Autism that wasn’t already available from public research papers.
As an autistic person with 3 kids with ASD, I get triggered by this bullshit nearly daily. I sincerely hope that whatever "reveal" they have planned does not further harm our ability to access the early interventions that my kids are benefiting from.
Not to be pessimistic, but I’m pretty sure that whatever they do will do more harm than good, given how much of a hot mess the current administration is.
Welp, better hope they don't decide it's a heritable condition that can only be solved via sterilization programs! Because that has absolutely happened before in North America.
I think it's more likely that it will be used as an excuse to actively harm and oppress autistic people and anyone else they can use pseudoscience to try to label as 'damaged' or 'unnatural', rather than merely taking away existing aid.
It’s hard to believe how much closer to Idiocracy the US is getting every day. I love how they quoted what RFK and Trump have said in the article to show how devoid of any substance any of that is.
probably shouldn't have pushed equally retarded rhetoric leading up to his most recent election.
Really? About the only comparable example I can think of was the Democrats' assurance that Biden was still fit to serve. Sure, they should have ditched him much earlier -- that much seems obvious -- but what "equally retarded rhetoric" can you stack up against "They're eating the dogs?"
A voter could justify an assumption that Biden was still a viable candidate simply because they hadn't been told otherwise by those in a position to know. But you actually had to be stupid to fall for "They're eating the dogs," along with countless other Trump lies backed by zero evidence.
It was a simple exercise in pattern recognition. No one who failed that exercise in 2024 should be allowed to vote in 2028. But of course, we have Trump's word that the matter is moot, given that voting won't be necessary.
>On August 24, 2021, then-Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin issued a memorandum requiring all U.S. armed forces members to get the COVID-19 vaccine. This policy, which was supported by then-President Joe Biden, led to the discharge of thousands of service members who refused the vaccine.
>It's important to note that a dishonorable discharge is a specific type of punishment that can only be issued after a court-martial for serious offenses. While some sources claimed that the Biden administration ordered dishonorable discharges for those who refused the vaccine, this was not the case. The President does not have the authority to issue such an order, and the military services themselves handled disciplinary actions.
>The military's COVID-19 vaccine mandate was rescinded in January 2023 after Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act, which directed the Department of Defense to end the mandate.
* Biden failed to force everyone to get the vaccine
to
* The DOD added COVID-19 vaccines to the Joint Regulation on Immunization and Chemoprophylaxis for the Prevention of Infectious (which already included several mandatory vaccines including for influenza) after the FDA had approved the Pfizer vaccine, mandating military personnel to get the vaccine until 2023.
Very interesting that once you unpack an anti-vaxxers alarmist arguments, you're left with a completely different understanding of reality with nuance and all.
You have misrepresented my claims. The CDC and Biden tried to force vaccination. The DOD thing is another, similar issue. The DOD mandate DID get enforced though, and many military personnel left over it or were forced to quit. In the end, I believe they sued and won some compensation as well as got rehired.
>Very interesting that once you unpack an anti-vaxxers alarmist arguments, you're left with a completely different understanding of reality with nuance and all.
Very interesting that you cannot comprehend the nuance of someone like me who supports reasonable voluntary use of proven safe and effective vaccines, who opposes forcing proven ineffective and experimental vaccine technology on the entire public without reservation, under threat of exile from society. I'm not taking bullshit from big pharma or government so that must make me an anti-vax simpleton, eh? Gtfo
Please share with me the article where Biden attempted but failed to literally break into my house and force a vaccine into my and my children's veins while we were sleeping.
Oh no, he didn't push that. He just tried to command all US employers to require vaccination as a condition of employment. That is severely oppressive. I've seen many cases of people being forced to take the vaccine for stupid reasons, despite known risks, and suffering severe consequences such as organ failure or permanent disability. That is what a mandate does. It eliminates any discretion of the individual. If you had covid once then you don't need a vaccine. Natural immunity is better than a vaccine. Vaccines can harm your immune system, especially in excess. You should only get important ones, not every single one out of the hundreds or thousands out there on the market. Your immune system is finite and can be exhausted.
By the way, if the vaccine worked, then the people who got it wouldn't have to worry about the people who didn't, right? In fact it is completely opposite. The unvaccinated could get the virus from the vaccinated, who were told (at first) that they were immunized and did not have to take precautions anymore. The whole situation was insulting to our intelligence and a severe attack on our basic human rights. Don't give me some bullshit convoluted argument about potentially improved outcomes for people getting the vaccine. That never was good enough reason to force anyone to get a vaccine, especially under threat of being denied healthcare or employment.
I must give the establishment credit. They indoctrinated everyone very well, to the point that even 5 years later many still haven't recognized how badly covid was handled. They even got the ignorant feeling uppity about thinking everyone who is against the way it was handled is anti-vax. I got the stupid vaccine. I stopped getting boosters (like most normal people) when it became clear that the vaccine wasn't working and the virus had mutated to be more harmless than ever. I never got the virus even once but everyone I know who got double boosted and so on did get it, even multiple times (unless they were skipping work).
> Don't give me some bullshit convoluted argument about potentially improved outcomes for people getting the vaccine.
Ah there it is. See, it doesn't matter what numbers or sources I cite to you because it'll all just be bullshit in your eyes. You've already made up your mind and nothing can convince you otherwise.
> I stopped getting boosters (like most normal people) when it became clear that the vaccine wasn't working and the virus had mutated to be more harmless than ever. I never got the virus even once but everyone I know who got double boosted and so on did get it, even multiple times (unless they were skipping work).
It's not at all incorrect. But you are clearly programmed very well. If I prove it to you, you will "yes, but" me to death. No thanks.
>Ah there it is. See, it doesn't matter what numbers or sources I cite to you because it'll all just be bullshit in your eyes. You've already made up your mind and nothing can convince you otherwise.
No, it is not that NO amount of evidence would convince me. It is that the arguments put forth by the mainstream are weak, indirect, and illogical. You seem to know that already, because you aren't even trying. I could be charitable and say this is just a difference of opinion, and maybe the vaccine did help some people. That is still far from a compelling reason to FORCE anyone to get it. Trust me, if COVID was actually bad and the vaccine was actually effective, you'd have been more afraid of other people trying to get the vaccine than you would be of the disease. A lot of people didn't want or need the so-called vaccine because they knew that it didn't work (well enough), and it had risks (in general, or for them), and that being forced to get a vaccine is a major civil rights violation.
>This is Facebook uncle-posting tier.
I think telling you what tier your comments hit would get me banned on here.
Remember when the CDC started tracking gun violence as an "epidemic"? Surely someone should but the CDC doing so is clearly outside of its charter. That was one major moment that betrayed the CDC becoming a political and not a scientific organization
And neither of those are being tackled at all. It's as it's all or nothing. I prefer always to tackle complex problems through multiple angles, because they are complex.
This is a problem. Government departments must have delimited authority and scope. There are other government and nonprofit entities tracking gun violence. Absolutely no need for CDC to get involved except for stupid politics. It's a distraction from their core mission.
I doubt this took much of their resources or attention at all. Seems more like commenters are mad about this data being tracked rather than genuine concern over the departments resource allocations.
The CDC was directed by Congress to prevent injuries by the 1986 Injury Prevention Act and the 1990 Injury Control Act, notwithstanding your superficial and frankly moronic understanding of the agency.
Plenty of other organizations public and private already handling this issue. No need to waste funds on it. Anything less is a dangerous distraction for the CDC which really needs to focus on its core competency -- protecting the us from pathogenic threats. Should the department of HUD send rockets to space? Of course not.
“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is the national public health agency of the United States. It is a United States federal agency under the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia.”
I’m not sure how to explain to you that some problems are multi-factorial.
Have you never needed another department’s assistance with a work task?
The CDC and HUD (and EPA and DOJ and whatnot) would both be involved in lead exposure in children, for example. Different aspects of the same big problem.
Don't have a dog in this race, but were they also tracking deatha from auto accidents and the like? Because if it was part of a big pie chart of how people die, then no problem. If it was specifically only about guns, then it was political.
All external injuries (mostly traumas, but also burns, poison, frostbite, etc.) that result in deaths, no matter their intention (murder, accident, suicide) have 2 chapters dedicated in the International Classification of Diseases 10 (also 11). Yes, tracking what harms and kills people is kinda important from the public health standpoint, so that there are resources to deal with the injuries and educate in case of prevention. It also happens to be interested in work related injuries too!
To add to other comments, gun violence has a massive mental health component for which preventative treatment can save many lives. Of course it warrants study!
And given the well-documented copycat-killer phenomenon, modeling it similarly to an epidemic is very reasonable.
It would also be political, and unlawful, for the CDC to fail to fulfill the mandate that Congress has given it to prevent injury for the last 39 years.
Has the stability of CDC changed between this and the rest of presidencies, across the political spectrum?
Your angle reminds of a recent post -
> "John, when people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."— Isaac Asimov, The Relativity of Wrong
Does 47,000 deaths per year (13.7 per 100,000) not qualify?
Why are you even complaining (trolling)? After decades of pressure, the gun lobby (NRA, GOA, etc) has finally eliminated CDC's role in researching gun violence.
Is outright victory insufficient? Must you continue to belabor the point?
I respect their decisions, but our country deeply needs scientists so committed to the Hippocratic oath that they’d rather resign than contribute to endangering public safety.
Those who do not seek power are most fit to hold it.
I have nothing really to say other than this is saddening to read.