When the US government officially ended the Covid-19 public health emergency (PHE) in 2023, it meant that detailed hospital reporting requirements enacted during the pandemic would eventually also be sunsetted.
Hospital executives do not like the reporting requirement so it ended. Agribusiness do not want their workers tested for H5N1 (or their animals, until it becomes absolutely unavoidable), so they aren't. Farmworkers are afraid of losing their jobs, so they avoid involvement with the medical system.
Other than advocating for vaccines, is there any difference between the CDC under the Biden administration, and that under Trump? (And absolutely yes, these administrations were vastly different in other respects.)
No. Except that under the Biden administration the availability of data is actually much worse. Because, by then health leaders and politicians were following, rather than leading a public who was just “tired” of it all.
The lack of data regarding bird flu isn’t really surprising, even if disappointing. Consider that the last several years have seen a steady decline in available and/or useful information about COVID. First test data became meaningless since test reporting dwindled, then hospitalization data became less meaningful with reporting requirements disappearing after the expiration of the public emergency order as you point out in your comments. Then the only real measure of how serious the disease continued to be became the actual numbers of people dying. But then the CDC began making those numbers harder and harder to find - and publishing only numbers per 100,000 and even showing only the changes in those numbers, rather than the actual numbers of deaths. Then people searching for the absolute numbers were referred to reports of deaths from all causes which lagged by weeks and even months. But the CDC continued, and continues, to report the number of deaths per 100,000 without clarification of whether those figures and the changes in them were generated from the lagged reporting database or some more relevant source that the CDC was choosing to not make available to the public.
I think that the lack of candor and transparency and urgency by the CDC with regard to COVID data has itself contributed significantly to a general lack of interest in gathering information on bird flu. That information should be collected, but playing down the ongoing risks of Covid to avoid “political blowback” has encouraged an attitude of “what, me worry” and brought us to where we are now.
Thanks, Jeremy, for giving me many more reasons to worry!!
Coming from my perspective as a consultant for Juul Labs, I would also note that I appreciate your pointing to EVALI as a good example of signal detection. I would have you read this Medium post, below, from journalist Marc Gunther as to the rest of the response to the outbreak. The new Audible #Backfired: The Vaping Wars podcast also does a very thoughtful treatment on EVALI.
CDC and overall public health policies regarding COVID have largely been driven by preferences of the American Hospital Association and CEOs of large corporations (see e.g. https://rollcall.com/2020/03/13/hospitals-want-to-kill-a-policy-shielding-nurses-from-covid-19-because-there-arent-enough-masks/ and https://www.npr.org/2021/12/29/1068731487/delta-ceo-asks-cdc-to-cut-quarantine) since January 2020. H5N1 policies follow the same pattern.
Hospital executives do not like the reporting requirement so it ended. Agribusiness do not want their workers tested for H5N1 (or their animals, until it becomes absolutely unavoidable), so they aren't. Farmworkers are afraid of losing their jobs, so they avoid involvement with the medical system.
Other than advocating for vaccines, is there any difference between the CDC under the Biden administration, and that under Trump? (And absolutely yes, these administrations were vastly different in other respects.)
No. Except that under the Biden administration the availability of data is actually much worse. Because, by then health leaders and politicians were following, rather than leading a public who was just “tired” of it all.
The lack of data regarding bird flu isn’t really surprising, even if disappointing. Consider that the last several years have seen a steady decline in available and/or useful information about COVID. First test data became meaningless since test reporting dwindled, then hospitalization data became less meaningful with reporting requirements disappearing after the expiration of the public emergency order as you point out in your comments. Then the only real measure of how serious the disease continued to be became the actual numbers of people dying. But then the CDC began making those numbers harder and harder to find - and publishing only numbers per 100,000 and even showing only the changes in those numbers, rather than the actual numbers of deaths. Then people searching for the absolute numbers were referred to reports of deaths from all causes which lagged by weeks and even months. But the CDC continued, and continues, to report the number of deaths per 100,000 without clarification of whether those figures and the changes in them were generated from the lagged reporting database or some more relevant source that the CDC was choosing to not make available to the public.
I think that the lack of candor and transparency and urgency by the CDC with regard to COVID data has itself contributed significantly to a general lack of interest in gathering information on bird flu. That information should be collected, but playing down the ongoing risks of Covid to avoid “political blowback” has encouraged an attitude of “what, me worry” and brought us to where we are now.
Thanks, Jeremy, for giving me many more reasons to worry!!
Coming from my perspective as a consultant for Juul Labs, I would also note that I appreciate your pointing to EVALI as a good example of signal detection. I would have you read this Medium post, below, from journalist Marc Gunther as to the rest of the response to the outbreak. The new Audible #Backfired: The Vaping Wars podcast also does a very thoughtful treatment on EVALI.
https://medium.com/the-great-vape-debate/the-cdcs-evali-screwup-ff09f4c3e187